Dos Santos led a long and ultimately successful resistance, with Cuba, to repeated military attacks by apartheid South Africa. However, his legacy is indelibly marked by his family’s excessive level of corruption and his oil-rich country’s failure to correct extreme inequality. In April 1974 the fascist regime in Portugal, the colonial power, fell. That September dos Santos was elected to the central committee and political office of the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola), while serving as a telecommunications officer. After independence in 1975 he became Minister of Foreign Affairs and later Minister of Planning under the first president, the poet, doctor and intellectual Agostinho Neto, a veteran of Portugal’s prisons. The war of independence turned into the worst colonial confrontation as the US, under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, chose to protect the white South African regime and the Namibian occupation from growing resistance in the region. They had their own candidate for leader of independent Angola, Jonas Savimbi of Unita (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). As Portugal retreated in 1975, the South African army, backed by the CIA, invaded Angola to prevent the MPLA, with its support for the African National Congress and the Namibian independence movement, Swapo, from taking power. Cuba brought a military force across the Atlantic to support the MPLA, stopping this plan, and Angola declared independence, led by the MPLA, on November 11, 1975. However, a new war was immediately unleashed in Angola by South Africa, using Unita as proxy. Meanwhile, the country was thrown into crisis by a violent coup attempt in May 1977 by pro-Soviet militants hoping that their alleged sympathies for Moscow would bring them outside support. When Neto died suddenly in 1979, dos Santos, aged just 37, was elected as his successor by the Politburo, partly because of his loyal behavior during the coup attempt, but also as a representative of a younger generation. Dos Santos inherited a crippled country and an active war. Under President Ronald Reagan from 1981, the US openly aided Unita. Angola resisted numerous South African invasions and attacks with the help of Cuba. The massive destruction of the country’s infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of destitute, injured and displaced people was the reality. But in late 1987 Cuba turned the tide by sending its best planes, best pilots, weapons and 30,000 troops to southern Angola to relieve the 12,000-strong cream of the Angolan army surrounded at Cuito Cuanavale by a South African air force. superiority. At the end of March 1988 the battle of Cuito Cuanavale was won and the South African army was forced to withdraw. Later that year in a tripartite agreement, which gave Namibia independence, Cuban troops also agreed to withdraw. Dos Santos led the country into a new phase with UN-monitored elections, which the MPLA won. But Unita went back to war again when they lost the election. In the 1990s, as the conflict continued, corruption scandals engulfed senior Angolans regarding arms deals with the former Soviet bloc, and French politician Charles Pasqua was convicted and later acquitted of profiting from illegal arms sales to Angola while in Tin at the same time there were strange transactions to repay a debt of 5 billion dollars to the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin. Several peace agreements were again signed by the Dos Santos government with Unita, and in 1997 a government of national unity was formed with Unita and another former group, the FNLA. Dos Santos and others in the MPLA leadership wanted and enforced leniency towards former Unita fighters – revenge and prosecution could easily ensue. However, Savimbi, with a group of his soldiers, continued the war until his death in February 2002. a final peace agreement was signed two months later. Despite the military victory, as an indicator of the possibility of reconciliation those who had followed Savibi to the end were eventually reintegrated into national politics. Born in the capital, Luanda, José was the son of Jacinta José Paulino and Avelino Eduardo dos Santos. While at school he joined the MPLA, which sent him to the Soviet Union to obtain degrees in petroleum engineering and radar transmission in Azerbaijan. In 1970 he returned via the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) and joined the MPLA rebels as a wireless operator in the inhospitable equatorial forest of Cabinda. The MPLA’s involvement with Cuba had begun five years earlier, when Neto and another leader, Lucio Lara, met Che Guevara in Brazzaville. A handful of Cuban guerrillas went to Cabinda as military advisers. Dos Santos served as deputy commander in the telecommunications unit and became the MPLA’s representative in Yugoslavia, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and China before joining its central committee. In line with the fall of communism in eastern Europe, in 1991 dos Santos declared at an MPLA conference that Marxism was over and social democracy was the way forward. The party was then heading towards a mood of political paralysis and a degree of demobilization, evident at the end of the civil war. From 2002 onwards, significant infrastructure was built, mainly with Chinese aid, Brazilian cooperation and the help of the oil boom that had started in the 1990s. But an air of corruption was embedded in these achievements that occurred with the weakening of the MPLA’s original principle of putting political commitment above self-interest. It was a sign of the times that in 2016 dos Santos appointed his daughter Isabel to head Angola’s main national asset, the Sonangol oil company. His son José Filomeno (Zenú) headed the $5 billion national fund. In 2017 the president decided not to seek re-election. As part of the anti-corruption campaign launched by his successor, João Lourenço, Isabel was removed from Sonangol and in 2020 Zenú was sentenced to five years in prison after returning significant sums of money sent abroad. He appealed. The ongoing court cases show a massive level of diversion of government resources to private interests and hundreds of millions of dollars in bank loans that have never been repaid. The Dos Santos family and several generals close to the former president who benefited from these deals have now lost their fortunes and are awaiting court hearings. Isabel, whose business empire once spanned a supermarket chain, telecoms, breweries and banking interests, has denied any wrongdoing. The former president spent his last years in exile in Barcelona. Isabel was the daughter of his first marriage, to Tatiana Kukanova, whom he had met in Azerbaijan. This marriage ended in divorce and two more followed before, in 1991, dos Santos married Ana Paula de Lemos, who survived him, and with whom he had three children, Édouane, Joseana and Eduardo. Tchizé’s children and the musician Coréon Dú (José Eduardo Paulino dos Santos) came from his relationship with Maria Luisa Abrantes. Zenú came from one with Filomena Sousa. José Eduardo dos Santos, politician, born 28 August 1942; died 8 July 2022
