José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled Angola during a brutal civil war and navigated the cross-currents of the Cold War to last 38 years as president, becoming one of Africa’s longest-reigning and most rapacious tyrants, has died on 8 July in a clinic in Barcelona. He was 79.
The Angolan government announced his death on its Facebook page. News reports say he has been traveling to Spain for several years for cancer treatment.
During his nearly four decades in power, from 1979 to 2017, Mr. dos Santos steered his resource-rich nation through seemingly endless conflict and an uneasy peace marred by corruption that funneled vast fortunes to his family and few benefited while leaving most Angolans in dire poverty.
More than half a million people were killed in a civil war that displaced more than 3 million and left much of the country in ruins or littered with landmines, even as Angola became Africa’s second-largest oil producer and third-largest producer of diamonds. .
A fiercely private, even reclusive figure, Mr. dos Santos largely eschewed any cult of personality. Even his image on the national currency was partially hidden by another portrait. He gave few speeches or interviews, revealing little of his personal life. He offered a tight smile in official photos, none of which showed his office or homes.
Mr. dos Santos was eventually forced into exile — to a $7.2 million mansion in Barcelona — after his successor, President João Lourenço, unexpectedly launched an anti-corruption crackdown that engulfed the long-untouchable dos Santos family and his collaborators.
The main target of the investigation was Isabel dos Santos, the eldest daughter of the former president and considered the richest woman in Africa. In 2020, she was charged with money laundering, counterfeiting and other financial crimes stemming from her tenure as head of Angola’s national oil company, Sonangol.
Prosecutors are relying heavily on a vast trove of leaked financial and business records disclosed by news organizations working with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit investigative organization. The Luanda Leaks scandal links Isabel dos Santos or her husband to more than 400 corporate entities in 41 countries and offshore tax havens.
She had lavish homes in London and Dubai and built a secret business empire worth an estimated $3.5 billion, but denied wrongdoing. Two of her half-siblings fled abroad. A half-brother, José Filomeno dos Santos, was arrested in 2018 and later sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling up to $500 million from the Angolan state investment fund he ran.
In total, the Lorenzo government estimated that more than $24 billion was looted during Mr. dos Santos’ rule, allegedly through the illegal diversion of oil revenues, expensive government contracts, deep-rooted patronage and other schemes.
Mr dos Santos “allowed immediate and extended family and associates to dominate commercial activity in what has become a stagnant economy [and] textbook kleptocracy,” said Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at Chatham House, a British think tank.
Despite his understated public image, Mr dos Santos wielded almost unlimited power. He headed the armed forces, led the security services and led the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, the force that has dominated almost every aspect of Angolan life since the Portuguese colony gained independence in 1975.
At that point, Mr. dos Santos’ faction was supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union. The United States and apartheid-era South Africa supported the MPLA’s main military rival, known by the acronym UNITA, fomenting a destructive superpower proxy war for control of Angola. The country’s civil war outlasted the Cold War, ending only in 2002.
During his long tenure, Mr. dos Santos’ regime relied on what State Department human rights reports described as arbitrary arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings, as well as a murky judicial process and restrictions on freedom of assembly, speech and the press.
A shrewd mediator, Mr. dos Santos achieved his political longevity by shifting allies and ideologies as the world changed around him. As the Soviet Union began to crumble, the one-time Marxist-Leninist allowed a partial market economy, allowing Chevron, Texaco and other American companies to take advantage of Angola’s vast offshore oil fields, the country’s main source of income.
In time, he abandoned Marxism-Leninism altogether, expelled the Cuban forces, and allowed the country’s first multiparty elections. The United States became Angola’s largest trading partner and Mr dos Santos made four working visits to the White House by 2004.
Since then, an increasing share of the country’s oil has gone to China. As part of a loan-for-oil program, China has invested more than $20 billion in roads, schools, power plants and other infrastructure in Angola, according to Portuguese news agency Lusa.
However, the World Bank estimates that more than half of Angola’s population of more than 30 million lives on less than $1.90 a day. Angola’s life expectancy remains among the lowest in the world and its infant mortality rate is among the highest.
José Eduardo dos Santos, the son of a bricklayer, was born in Luanda, the capital, on August 28, 1942. His high grades earned him one of the few places available to African students at a school attended by children of the Portuguese elite. Amid growing anti-colonial sentiment on the continent, he enlisted in the MPLA army at the age of 20, determined to end four centuries of Portuguese rule.
Like many African fighters, he found support in Moscow. He received a degree in petroleum engineering in 1969 from a college in Baku, Azerbaijan, then a Soviet republic.
He was a member of the MPLA’s central committee when Portugal agreed to grant independence to Angola in 1975. The transitional government in Luanda collapsed as fighting broke out between the MPLA and rival guerrilla groups, including the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA .
With the help of Havana and Moscow, the MPLA managed to secure a shaky new government under President Agostinho Neto, but his death from cancer in 1979 elevated Mr dos Santos – then a key member of the cabinet – to president, head of the armed forces and head of National Assembly.
Angola – a country twice the size of France – remains in dire straits. The currency was almost worthless and the civil war, often waged by child soldiers, destroyed infrastructure and sent millions fleeing.
Multiparty elections in 1992, held under a ceasefire and monitored by the United Nations, marked the first real chance for peace. But when Jonas Savimbi, the US-backed leader of UNITA, lost decisively to Mr dos Santos, he falsely claimed fraud and resumed the war.
Savimbi’s forces soon overran vast territories and cut supply lines to the cities, causing famine in some areas. As the casualties and atrocities mounted, Aliun Blondin Beye, the UN special envoy to Angola, called it “the worst war in the world”. A peace agreement was only reached after Angolan troops killed Savimbi in February 2002.
Mr. dos Santos was married to Ana Paula dos Santos, a former fashion model and flight attendant. He reportedly fathered four to eight children by various wives and relationships, but there is no official list of survivors.
Suffering from ill health, Mr. dos Santos voluntarily stepped down in the 2017 legislative elections and handed power to Lorenzo, his former defense minister and political protégé.
A year later, Mr dos Santos sat in stunned silence at an MPLA conference as his handpicked successor denounced recent “corruption, nepotism, flattery and impunity” in a thinly veiled attack on the former ruling family.
To those gathered, Mr dos Santos did not apologize, admitted unspecified mistakes and said he was leaving with his “head held high”.
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