José Eduardo dos Santos

José Eduardo dos Santos was born in Luanda, Portuguese Angola, on the twenty-eighth of August 1942. He took his secondary education at the Liceu Salvador Correia in Luanda and joined the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1961 at the start of the Angolan War of Independence. He fled to exile in the People's Republic of Congo and from there to the Soviet Union, where he completed a degree in petroleum engineering at the Azerbaijan Industrial Oil Institute in 1970 and a year of military telecommunications training.

He returned to Angola in 1970, served as Vice Minister of Health under the MPLA's exile government in Luanda from 1975 (immediately after independence on the eleventh of November 1975), and as Foreign Minister from 1976 to 1978. He succeeded Agostinho Neto (also placed in this archive) as President of Angola on the twenty-first of September 1979 at thirty-seven.

His thirty-eight years in office (1979-2017) are the second-longest sustained presidency in modern African history after Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea. He led Angola through the second phase of the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002, against UNITA under Jonas Savimbi backed by South Africa and the United States), the Cuban military victory at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-88 that broke South African military projection into southern Africa, and the post-war oil-driven economic reconstruction of the 2000s and 2010s.

He stepped down voluntarily at the September 2017 election in favor of his chosen successor João Lourenço — among the few African heads of state of his generation to leave office through democratic transition. The corruption-investigation case launched against his daughter Isabel dos Santos after his retirement implicated the financial conduct of his presidency to a substantial degree.

He died in Barcelona on the eighth of July 2022, age seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the second President of Angola, whose thirty-eight years carried the country through war and reconstruction.