Fare Thee Well Eduardo Do Santos: Battle Is On To Define Your Legacy

In the 1980s, Eduardo dos Santos received support from Moscow in one of the fiercest proxy conflicts of the cold war The Financial Mail Former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos, who controlled the continent’s second-biggest oil producer with an iron Fhand for 38 years, has died at the age of 79. During almost four decades in power, dos Santos fought and won one of Africa’s bloodiest civil conflicts, oversaw Angola’s rise as an Opec crude producer and forged close ties with Beijing, making the country a symbol for Chinese influence on the continent. He also presided over one of the world’s most corrupt regimes, leaving Angolans in penury while the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) benefited from billions of dollars in oil wealth. Isabel dos Santos, his eldest daughter, emerged as Africa’s richest woman under his rule. The political legacy of dos Santos will be “the looting and kidnapping of a country, bent to the interests of the oligarchy he created”, Rafael Marques de Morais, an activist who was jailed by his regime, wrote this month. Angola had the promise of a new start in 2002 when the civil war finally ended, he said in