The Patriarch's Exit

July 8, 2022 3:07 PM

Former Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos dies at 79 ... Won Angola's war and took the spoils

Cavaco, Soares, Savimbi, Lourenço, Mobutu, Clinton, Fidel, Miterrand, Xi Jinping e dois Papas: José Eduardo dos Santos esteve com todos eles [photo gallery]
How two decades of corrupt deals made Isabel dos Santos Africa’s wealthiest woman and left oil- and diamond-rich Angola one of the world’s poorest countries. [ICIJ's Luanda Leaks]
Magnificent and Beggar Land
The Looting Machine

posted by chavenet (3 comments total)

Thanks for posting this, chavenet.

A few years ago I translated the biography of Sita Valles, an Angolan communist of Goan origin, from Portuguese, and in the process learned a fair amount about Angola and the MPLA. The civil war in Angola in the '70s was brutal, and while from a left-leaning perspective the MPLA was probably the best option among the warring factions (such as UNITA, which was somehow simultaneously backed by South Africa, the US, and the People's Republic of China), it was hardly an organization of principled socialists. MPLA infighting - including accusations of fraccionismo, or factionalism, which were investigated by a commission led by future president José Eduardo dos Santos - led to the attempted coup* of 27 May 1977, which resulted in the death and/or disappearance of tens of thousands of people, including the aforementioned Sita Valles.

The civil war then continued for the better part of 25 years, almost all of which were overseen by José Eduardo dos Santos. The MPLA calls him the "architect of peace" in one of the linked articles, which sound excessively laudatory to me. And, as the articles also point out, once there was peace in Angola, MPLA higher-ups and their kinfolk wasted no time in enriching themselves at the expense of the people. It's disgusting and heartbreaking. After centuries of exploitation by the Portuguese, Angolans deserve better.

I don't keep up with Angolan news nearly as much as I should, but I'm hoping that João Lourenço's presidency is a step in the right direction. Vamos ver.


*As the MPLA called it; I personally don't know how to characterize it.
posted by heteronym at 7:37 AM on July 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

"He humiliated people," said Alves da Rocha, a senior economist who worked for many years at the ministry of planning. "That's one of the reasons support for him collapsed once he left office."

That was a fascinating obituary. He built a house of cards that took a long time to collapse.
posted by craniac at 8:17 AM on July 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Long ago (in internet time), I read a trip diary by some South African guys that rode up through Namibia to Angola on motorcycles. They had fought in the war with Angolan and Cuban troops. The trip was surprisingly mellow, they got on well with their former adversaries. There were lots of photos showing what things looked like on the ground (still pretty shot up). It starts here.
posted by Bee'sWing at 1:26 PM on July 9, 2022 [3 favorites]