The story of Angola is as colourful as the characters who have populated that story.
The most colourful of these characters, of course, was Jonas Savimbi.
Many Pan-Africanists would remember the wars, drama and political shenanigans of the nineteen seventies, eighties and nineties. Southern Africa was in a state of flux as the Liberation Struggle raged. The Big Powers were fighting for stakes in the land and natural resources of Africa. Portugal was in retreat from its African colonies. Apartheid South Africa was looking to hold on to a buffer zone to protect itself from the creeping threat of black African nationalism.
Savimbi spoke four European languages, and was fluent in seven. He was beloved of the intellectual and political right-wing establishment in the USA and Europe. He was in continuous dialogue with the conservative Heritage Foundation – he would visit their offices, and they in turn showed up in his jungle redoubt even at the height of the Angolan civil war. He was received at the White House by two American Presidents – Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. Reagan tried to promote him to a sceptical African audience as a true champion of African Liberation, and even cooked up an alliance for him in the African American community through renegade black activist Roy Innis.
He was a tall imposing man with a thick beard who was as comfortable in formal suits as in battle fatigues. He was at once the suave intellectual and the swashbuckling guerrilla fighter. He learned Mao’s tactics from the Chinese, but soon became an agent of America and the West in the cold war against Russia and those perceived as its proxies.
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This was the man who led UNITA, one of the three major Angolan Liberation Movements. He was the figure who loomed large in the background, when General Murtala Mohammed, Head of State of Nigeria, made his famous “Africa Has Come Of Age” speech in Addis Ababa on 11th January, 1976, a speech that has gone down in the annals of African History as one of the turning points in the struggle to liberate not just Angola but the whole of the African continent, and the African mind, from colonial oppression.
(“…Africa has come of age. It is no longer under the orbit of any extra continental power. It should no longer take orders from any country…The fortunes of Africa are in our hands to make or to mar…for too long we have been treated like adolescents who cannot discern their interests and act accordingly…”)
The context of Murtala’s speech was instructive. The Portuguese had just been defeated in Angola. The MPLA, the ‘Liberation Movement’ backed by most Africa countries, but also backed by the Soviet Union, had taken over control of most of the country. It was embroiled in a civil war with two other liberation movements – the principal one of which was UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi. Savimbi was receiving massive military aid from America and Europe, as well as from the apartheid regime in South Africa. President Gerald Ford sent a letter to African leaders at their Summit in Addis Ababa, urging them to back Savimbi. It was in response to this letter that Murtala got up to make his speech, delivering the greatest slap in the face that America had received in many a year. Subsequent to this, the dominoes of ‘Western’ power in Southern Africa began inexorably to tumble.
Savimbi was eventually killed in battle in 1992.
The victors, the MPLA, were no knights in shining armour. They displayed Savimbi’s body, riddled with fifteen bullets, on national television to convince his diehard supporters that he was truly dead. Earlier, they had massacred ten thousand civilian supporters of Savimbi’s party in an infamous orgy of violence known as the “Halloween Massacre”, while they were protesting against the government on election day.
Augustinho Neto, a dour technocrat and medical doctor became the first president of Angola. When he died, he was succeeded as party leader and President by Jose Eduardo dos Santos.
Dos Santos would go on to become the second longest serving head of state in Africa, after Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea. He was President until 2018. In his tenure, Angola, from a basket case, became one of the richest countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The wealth was mostly from the oil in the province of Cabinda, and minerals, including diamonds. The nation shed all pretensions to “Communism”, the purported ideology of the MPLA, and became a “liberal democracy” with a “free market economy”.
The hard reality today is that, while a small number of people, principally former President Dos Santos and the children from his three marriages, along with their cronies, are exceedingly wealthy, most Angolans remain very poor indeed, with average daily income below $2.
It is clear that all is far from well within the MPLA government itself, as Dos Santos’ hand-picked successor has allowed details of clearly illegal transactions and illicit use of state resources by the Dos Santos family to be revealed to the world. A recent episode of BBC’s “PANORAMA” showed proof of criminal acquisition of wealth. Specifically, it revealed that Isabela – who contends with Nigeria’s Folorunsho Alakija for the title of “richest woman in Africa”, amassed her fortune substantially through the misuse of her father’s presidential powers during his tenure in office.
Isabela denies all the accusations. She lives comfortably in London, where she has many choice properties. She has even declared her intention to run in the next election for President of Angola, a statement that shows her father still has a strong political base in the country.
It is hard to find a befitting concluding line for this story, other than to say, for a land where “freedom” was bought so expensively with rivers of African blood, the leaders should be doing better than Isabela, her father, and the MPLA. Much better.
Femi Olugbile
