When Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto, died in 1979, José Eduardo dos Santos was seen by party bigwigs as a young, not especially clever, and pliable replacement. It wasn’t the last time he was misread
side was bolstered by Soviet guns and Cuban fighters;established a parallel state based on revenues from offshore oil fields, which drew in American oil majors. 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.
By the mid-1980s Mr dos Santos had used oil rents and astute patronage to achieve a strong grip over theand, thus, what amounted to the state. His tactics forged in those early years would continue throughout his reign. “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.
An emollient approach to elite politics was not, however, extended to the majority of Angolans. In the 1990s the proxy war became a full-scale civil war—one that arejected the results of multi-party elections, when thesupporters on the streets of Luanda. 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.
But unlike other African civil wars, such as Mozambique’s, Angola’s civil war ended in an all-out military victory for one side, after’s brutal leader, in 2002. 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.swapped Vladimir Lenin for Louis Vuitton.
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