Sonangol, the state-owned oil firm that ended up controlling much of the economy, was at the heart of everything. Luanda became arguably the most expensive city in the world as oil money gushed through a capital that had to import almost everything. But so did spectacular crony capitalism, as the MPLA swapped Vladimir Lenin for Louis Vuitton. Peace, more or less, followed (there was little punishment of vanquished UNITA leaders). The decision four years earlier to push for a complete triumph was to be Mr dos Santos’s “greatest contribution” to the country’s history, argues Alex Vines of Chatham House, a London-based think-tank. Almost a decade of fighting followed-one side funded by oil, the other by trade in illegally mined diamonds-that caused millions to flee their homes and much of the country to be pockmarked with landmines.īut unlike other African civil wars, such as Mozambique’s, Angola’s civil war ended in an all-out military victory for one side, after MPLA troops killed Jonas Savimbi, UNITA’s brutal leader, in 2002. The tone was set in late 1992, after UNITA rejected the results of multi-party elections, when the MPLA unleashed a massacre of UNITA supporters on the streets of Luanda.

In the 1990s the proxy war became a full-scale civil war-one that a UN diplomat called “the worst war in the world”. “He would allow you to keep your money and make you Ambassador to Tokyo.”Īn emollient approach to elite politics was not, however, extended to the majority of Angolans. “He wouldn’t send you to Siberia or shoot you,” says the Oxford professor. In general, unlike Mobutu, he bought off competitors and opponents, rather than killing them. “He was very street smart,” says Mr de Soares Oliveira, “full of the knowledge of men”-often using spies to find out intimate details about potential rivals, so as to blackmail or bribe them later. His tactics forged in those early years would continue throughout his reign. Soon a Soviet-backed Leninist party fighting American and South African proxies was being bankrolled by selling hydrocarbons extracted by American oil firms to South Africa under sanctions.īy the mid-1980s Mr dos Santos had used oil rents and astute patronage to achieve a strong grip over the MPLA and, thus, what amounted to the state. Yet, under Mr dos Santos, the MPLA established a parallel state based on revenues from offshore oil fields, which drew in American oil majors. The MPLA side was bolstered by Soviet guns and Cuban fighters UNITA by the Americans and apartheid South Africa. It was an archetypal cold-war proxy battle, replete with the contradictions of the time. The anti-colonial war against Portugal was followed by a conflict for control of the new country between the MPLA and its archrival, UNITA. “He was chronically underestimated,” notes Ricardo de Soares Oliveira, a scholar of Angola based at Oxford University.īy the time he became president Angola had been embroiled in conflict of one kind or another for almost two decades. It was neither the first nor the last time he was misread. When Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto, died from cancer in 1979, Mr dos Santos was seen by party bigwigs as a young, not especially clever, and pliable replacement. After a stint in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, then part of the Soviet Union, where he trained as a petroleum engineer, he returned to jobs in the party. Opposed to foreign rule, he joined the army of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola ( MPLA), a Soviet-style party founded by a small Luanda-based elite that would go on to rule the country uninterrupted after independence in 1975. Angola continues to suffer from his legacy, which it is struggling to shake off.īorn in Luanda, the capital, in 1942, while Angola was still under Portuguese rule, Mr dos Santos won a place at a school frequented by children of the colonial elite. He was arguably the master of the neo-patrimonial, or clientelistic, style of African politics that emerged after decolonisation, using vast oil rents to run his own dictatorship. He was also ruthless, repressive and staggeringly corrupt. His manner was restrained, he rarely gave interviews, and when he did he said little of interest.

He was president of Angola from 1979 to 2017. José Eduardo dos Santos, who was announced dead in a Barcelona hospital on July 8th, ruled for longer than any of these men.

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