José Eduardo dos Santos
José Eduardo dos Santos was president of Angola for thirty-eight years, from the death of Agostinho Neto in September 1979 to his retirement in September 2017, through the last twenty-three years of the civil war against Savimbi's UNITA, the Cuban and South African interventions, the peace of 1991 that broke down when he won the election of 1992 and Savimbi went back to the bush, the killing of Savimbi in 2002 that ended the war, and the fifteen years of oil-fed peace in which Luanda became the most expensive city in the world for foreigners and his daughter Isabel, by Forbes's count, the richest woman in Africa. He was born in Luanda in 1942, the son of a bricklayer, joined the MPLA as a student, spent the 1960s in exile, in Kinshasa and then in the Soviet Union studying petroleum engineering at Baku, which was the education that mattered, and came home to the war of independence as a party official. Neto made him foreign minister at independence in 1975 and the politburo chose him as the compromise successor in 1979, a technocrat with no faction, and he outlasted every faction. The war was the state. Cuban troops held the cities against UNITA and the South Africans, the Soviets supplied the arms, the Americans supplied Savimbi, and the oil off Cabinda, pumped by Gulf and then Chevron and sold to the Americans, paid for the army that fought their client; at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 the war reached its stalemate and the settlement of that year sent the Cubans and the South Africans home. He abandoned Marxism in 1990, signed the Bicesse accords with Savimbi in 1991, won the first round of the 1992 election with forty-nine per cent, and when Savimbi refused the result the war resumed worse than before, with the Halloween massacre of UNITA supporters in Luanda and sieges of the highland towns that killed hundreds of thousands. The army found and shot Savimbi in February 2002 and the war stopped within weeks. The peace was his and his family's: the oil revenues passed through the state company Sonangol, whose accounts were opaque, his daughter chaired it, his son ran the sovereign wealth fund, and the country ranked among the most corrupt on earth while its GDP grew at ten per cent. He stepped down in 2017 in favour of his defence minister, João Lourenço, who promptly prosecuted the family. He died in Barcelona in July 2022 and Angola gave him a state funeral his daughters contested.
- Lived: 1942 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Angolan
- Roles: president, politician
