ELEPHANT EYE: Sousa Jamba says the Dos Santos family squabble over who gets the former Angolan president’s body is far more captivating than next month’s elections.
At the height of their power in 2015, the children of the late Angolan president owned a media company that produced a drama series that caused much furore in the country when the storyline included a gay couple and a kiss.
The uproar over the beijo gay (gay kiss) was so loud that president José Eduardo dos Santos himself ordered the series off the air.
Eduardo dos Santos was a man of very few public words; but he surrounded himself with boisterous loudmouths given to theatrics.
The ensuing brouhaha over his body is familiar to many Angolans who, during his four decade reign, had been used to people close to him fighting loudly over his patronage while he remained deathly still.
The latest drama has all to do with who has a final say over where and when Dos Santos is to be buried.
Until his death, he lived in a six million dollar four storey mansion with a gigantic pool, gigantic garage, a gym and a discotheque in the basement in an exclusive suburb of Barcelona.
He was also surrounded by a retinue of aides: cooks, medical team, major domos, and his children Isabel, Tchize, and José Avelino, who took time off from his music and modeling career.
A Portuguese television channel ran a report about the big house. Anything to do with Dos Santos is deeply fascinating to the Portuguese public in part because many want to follow what is going on in what was once the jewel in their lost empire.
The Spanish court has yet to decide who gets Dos Santos’ body. On the one hand there is Tchize dos Santos, the garrulous second daughter, who has a million faithful followers on various social media platforms.
Tchize hates President Joao Lourenço with a passion. She accuses him of being an ungrateful jumped-up general and a sorcerer.
She accuses Lourenço of wanting Dos Santos’ body so badly so he could have the intense joy of a wizard in seeing his victim being put in the ground. And she insists that the body can only go to Angola after the elections or after Lourenço is out of power.
She insists that in life her father regretted having chosen Lourenço as his successor and had expressed his support for opposition UNITA leader Adalberto Costa Júnior.
Some of Lourenço’s defenders were outraged by Tchize dos Santos’ utterances and accused her of being psychologically unstable.
A Portuguese doctor issued a statement saying he had diagnosed her with a disorder which resulted in delusions. Soon, she produced a statement from another Portuguese doctor (a university professor) who said after extensive tests he had concluded that Tchize dos Santos was of sound mind. She came out with another volley of insults against Lourenço.
Opposing Tchize is Ana Paula dos Santos, the former first lady, who had not been with the president in the last five years of his life.
A few months before the president’s death, she turned up at the Barcelona house and occupied some rooms. Tchize dos Santos would have none of it; she accused her stepmother of walking out on her father and attending drunken parties while her husband was in pain.
Dos Santos married the former air hostess in 1991 when she was 28 and he was 49. Tchize dos Santos never got over the fact that Dos Santos left her mother, the lawyer Maria Luisa Abrantes, to marry the air hostess who now was going to have a final say as to where her father was going to be buried.
Ana Paula dos Santos is no walkover and is said to have been restrained by security guards when she had charged at her half-Russian stepdaughter, Isabel (from Dos Santos’ first marriage) who had become too bolshie for her liking.
The former first lady is being backed by the government, which has hired a special legal team for her, and has also sent General Francisco Pereira Furtado, the head of the military wing of the presidency.
Furtado has vowed that he will only return to Angola with Dos Santos’ body. The vast government delegation is staying in a posh Barcelona hotel; some, perhaps to stave off boredom, have been leaking stories to the Portuguese press to paint the other side as completely unreasonable.
In Luanda, the state media has been promoting a woman called Josefa Matias, who claims to be Dos Santos’ first daughter from the time when he was in the Congo during the sixties in the struggle against Portuguese colonialism.
In 2011, in a rare interview in which Dos Santos talked about his personal life, he denied being the biological father of the woman in question. Yet, after his death, the woman has been all over claiming that it is she and not Isabel dos Santos who should have had the title of first daughter.
Rumors have been swirling around saying although Dos Santos had denied Josefa Matias in public, in private he had given her a diamond mine in eastern Angola. No one will ever accuse Dos Santos of not being generous when it came to his children.
Tchize dos Santos saw this promotion of what she saw as a fake sister as yet another ploy by Lourenço to humiliate her father.
In her nightly effusions, followed by millions, she has been saying that she doubts the paternity of some of her younger brothers and has called for all of them to go for DNA tests. So after all the wrangling over Dos Santos’ body in Barcelona, there might be another major drama in the Dos Santos family; and this time it will be in a Spanish paternity court with DNA experts.
The two main political parties in Angola have issued their political programmes for the elections next month. The public seems not to be paying much attention to them. The latest from Barcelona is far more captivating.
Image source: New York Times
