In the immensity of the interior of Angola, the legendary Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski faced a dangerous dilemma at a military checkpoint in the 1970s. In their makeshift uniforms he didn't know if the soldiers were pro-Soviet, whom he was to greet as comrades, or anti-communist, whom he was to treat as brothers. He gambled, gabbling, comrade, and, according to him, he was spared the worst. This tremendous Angolanism reappeared with the death on July 8 in Barcelona of former dictator José Eduardo dos Santos, in the grotesque Catalan epilogue of a civil war that lasted 27 years, with perhaps a million dead. Doubts have even arisen as to whether the former president wanted, or at least did not care, that the side he defeated on the battlefield would now take power.
"The Architect of Peace". This is how Dos Santos was presented in the Angola that, as of 2002, turned the page of the fratricidal conflict. The motto recalls the 25 years of peace with which the Franco regime commemorated the anniversary of its triumph in 1964. It is perceived that, unlike a war against an external enemy, it is not easy even for dictatorships to celebrate the massacre of compatriots.
Having consolidated the pacification is the merit that is usually attributed to one of the longest-lived autocrats, with 38 years in power. He agreed to it, in addition to being helped by an ethnic issue, thanks to his discreet profile to succeed Agostinho Neto, who died in 1979, two years after an internal rebellion that resulted in a bloodbath. The implacable but also fixer Dos Santos applied another line of deterrence and manipulation, while building a kleptocracy, a massive assault on the coffers of this oil and diamond-producing state, with cosmic social inequalities.
The embezzlement was also perpetrated through several of his children, such as Zenú, sentenced to five years in prison for emptying part of the sovereign fund, and Isabel, who fled abroad and looted the public oil company. A decade ago, in Portugal sunk in the misery of the ransom, she was the spearhead of a kind of economic colonization of the metropolis by the former domain, by buying everything she could get her hands on in Lisbon at rock-bottom prices. .
The conquest of Angola's independence did not take place in Luanda, but in the Portuguese capital, with a carnation as a symbol, that of the 1974 revolution, made by soldiers fed up with more than a decade of impossible and extemporaneous African combats. Meanwhile, the civil war was already underway. As Kapuscinski recounts in One More Day Alive, when the Portuguese authorities left in 1975, the Angolans were busy shooting each other.
It was a three-way match, although Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) soon left the scene. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), led by Neto and Dos Santos, and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), led by Jonas Savimbi, remained. The MPLA, which always controlled the capital, was pro-Soviet, which allowed Dos Santos to enjoy a scholarship to become a petroleum engineer in Baku, now Azerbaijan. There he married for the first time and had his eldest daughter, Isabel, the eldest of his ten children with six women, according to Expresso.
Beyond the weapons and advisers from Moscow, the support of the communist bloc was channeled through the decisive Cuban aid, with the several tens of thousands of men that Fidel Castro deployed in Angola. Savimbi, pro-Western, had the backing of the CIA and apartheid South Africa, which was attacking the bases of the Namibian independence guerrillas.
The fall of the USSR seemed to herald peace, with the presidential elections of 1992, the second round of which never took place, while Unita took up arms again, although with less and less external support, until the assassination of Savimbi in the 2002 meant the end. The journalist Emídio Fernando dedicated a biography to him, an entire novel.
Estelle Maussion, biographer of Dos Santos, maintains that before the elections, to call them in some way, of 2017, the already very worn-out dictator made a reflection. He could dig in until he was swept away by history, like so many others, or withdraw. He opted for the latter, passed the baton to João Lourenço and failed in his attempt to continue controlling the game. Lourenço put an end to the impunity of the children of his predecessor and he ended up living in Barcelona, where he had already been treated for cancer for years, to the point that in Angola they left him for dead several times in Catalonia.
In a spectacular turn of history, Tchizé dos Santos, the only daughter who dedicated herself to politics and with a certain tendency to histrionics, denounced that her father was killed to prevent him from revealing his predilection for the presidential elections on August 24 by the Unita candidate, the loser of the civil war, but the autopsy does not support this version. What is clear is that Lourenço's attempts to approach him had not been successful in getting Dos Santos to support him.
It is the grotesque Catalan epilogue to the war in Angola, in which some of the sons would have asked for an amnesty in exchange for the former dictator having a state funeral in Luanda, but after the elections, which it is believed that Lourenço will win by the good ones or the bad ones. Tchizé dos Santos even talked about how it would be the first political asylum for a dead person if her father is still in Barcelona. His excellence of present body is titled a novel by the great Angolan writer Pepetela.
