José Eduardo dos Santos, who has died aged 79, was president of Angola for almost four dramatic decades, commander in chief of the armed forces and party leader. A desperate struggle for independence from Portugal was followed by 27 more war years as Angola supported the liberation struggles in southern Africa, paying an extremely high price for its principles.
Dos Santos led a long and finally successful resistance, with Cuba, to repeated military offensives by apartheid South Africa. However his legacy is indelibly marked by his family’s extravagant level of corruption and by his oil-rich country’s failure to remedy extreme inequality.
