The repatriation of the former president’s body on Saturday comes amid a tense election campaign and ended a week-long dispute between the Angolan government, dos Santos’ widow and some of his children over when and where he will be buried. A few dozen people gathered at Luanda airport to receive the coffin of the former leader, who ruled Angola from 1979 to 2017. Some applauded as the coffin, draped in the Angolan flag, was driven away followed by a procession of black cars, while others took to the streets to watch the procession pass. Some cheered, others chanted “Ze Du!”, dos Santos’ nickname, footage posted on social media showed. “The remains of Jose Eduardo dos Santos have arrived in Angola after a long period of waiting,” Marcy Lopez, a government minister, told reporters shortly after the coffin was removed from the plane. The funeral is likely to take place on August 28, dos Santos’ birthday, said Rui Falcao, a spokesman for the ruling MPLA party. In this September 26, 2017 file photo, current Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos waves as he arrives to attend the swearing-in ceremony of newly elected Angolan President Joao Lourenco in Luanda [File: Ampe Rogerio/ AFP] There have been weeks of uncertainty about the former president’s final resting place. Dos Santos died on July 8 at the age of 79 in a Barcelona clinic, where he was being treated after a long illness. Lawyers representing dos Santos’ daughter, Tchize, had successfully called for a full autopsy, citing alleged “suspicious circumstances” of his death without providing evidence, and had asked that he be buried in the Spanish city of Barcelona. A Spanish judge ruled Wednesday that the death was of natural causes, ruling out foul play, and allowed dos Santos’ remains to be released to his widow, Ana Paula. The judge also authorized his “repatriation and international transfer [dos Santos’s] remains in Angola”.
“Global Shame”
The repatriation came just days before Angolans go to the polls on Wednesday in a national vote. Launching his party’s campaign last month, President Joao Lourenco urged people to vote for the MPLA to honor dos Santos’ legacy. The MPLA, which was dos Santos’ party and is Lourenco’s, has ruled Angola since it gained independence from Portugal in 1975. “It seems like a very transparent ploy to monopolize the media, as usual,” Jon Schubert, a political anthropologist and Angola expert at the University of Basel, told Reuters, referring to the repatriation of dos Santos’ body. Most of Angola’s media is controlled by the state. Wednesday’s vote, in which voters will elect a new parliament and president, is likely to be the tightest since the first multi-party election there in 1992. The former president’s daughter Tchize, who had asked for her father’s body to be buried in Barcelona, accused Lourenco in an Instagram post of using his corpse as a campaign tool, which she said was a “global shame”. Critics also worried that the repatriation was an attempt to divert attention from the main opposition UNITA’s campaign and the electoral process. UNITA is stronger than ever, and anger is growing over government failures to turn vast oil wealth—Angola is Africa’s second-largest oil producer—into better living conditions for all. Dos Santos’ nearly four-decade tenure saw members of his family capitalize on the country’s oil wealth while most Angolans remained mired in poverty. When he resigned in 2017, dos Santos handed power to Lourenco, the former defense minister. But Lourenco quickly turned on the former president, launching an anti-corruption drive to recover billions suspected of being embezzled under dos Santos, a campaign targeting the former president’s family. Dos Santos never specifically responded to allegations that he had allowed corruption to run rampant. At a campaign rally on Saturday, Lourenco told a cheering crowd that the MPLA had “broken” the corruption taboo and “really started the fight against it”. Justin Pearce, a senior lecturer in history at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, said that while Lourenco was struggling to maintain support, he did not believe there was “any deep nostalgia for dos Santos in Angolan society”. He said Lourenco’s anti-corruption drive was aimed at gaining “some popular legitimacy”. In Luanda, some MPLA supporters said the return of the former president’s body to Angola was important to them. “We Angolans are proud to welcome the remains of President dos Santos and that he can have a decent funeral,” said Thelma Pilartes, one of the Angolans who had come to Luanda airport to see the arrival of the former leader’s coffin. . “For us, his return to Angola before the elections shows the importance he had in creating peace in our country,” said Sonia, an MPLA supporter who attended the party’s rally on Saturday. Dos Santos’ eldest daughter Isabel, who has faced a barrage of investigations into her multinational business dealings, meanwhile took to Instagram to express her sadness at not being able to attend her father’s funeral. “You took me to the altar and … I won’t be able to take you to your final (resting) place,” she wrote. “They took you out of my arms.”
