ELEPHANT EYE: Sousa Jamba says Angolans love their soap operas – but there’s never been one to match the drama around the corpse of José Eduardo dos Santos.
The body of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos, who died on 8 July, is still stuck in a mortuary in Barcelona, Spain.
A Spanish court has now decided that the late president’s previously estranged wife, Ana Paula dos Santos, was his lawful widow under Spanish law and can do what she likes with the body mainly, throwing a state funeral in Luanda, the Angolan capital.
This news made the headlines in the Angolan state-controlled media. Having Dos Santos’ body in Luanda would be a major coup (excuse the term) for the government.
Earlier, a group of unidentified men went to the mortuary with papers demanding Dos Santos’ body.
It turned out that they had links to the Angolan embassy in Madrid, the Spanish capital. Angolan social networks went ablaze with speculation; body snatching is often associated with witchcraft.
The whole drama around Dos Santos’ body is so captivating to many Angolans because people are deeply interested in the rows that follow deaths.
People love filming at graveyards when bitter family members start having a go at each other. It is not unusual for the wives and mistresses of the deceased and their respective families to engage in fierce fights at cemeteries.
The row around Dos Santos’ body also has ex-wives, mistresses and sisters at each other’s throats through social media.
The government issued a statement saying everything was not being made easy because of “two of Dos Santos’ many children”. That “many children” provoked some of the eight children to accuse the state media of being disrespectful.
The head of Angolan President João Lourenço’s security, General Francisco Furtado, stepped forward and said he would end all this nonsense around the body. He went to Spain, amid much publicity, and proclaimed that he would only return with Dos Santos’ body.
Furtado stayed in a posh Barcelona hotel for two weeks and returned to Luanda without the body.
José Eduardo dos Santos’ two daughters — Tchize and Isabel — insist that former first lady Ana Paula dos Santos had abandoned their father and had been partying with muscled toyboys while he was ill.
They also accuse the former first lady of working in tandem with President João Lourenço with whom they have a long-standing beef for having confiscated most of their businesses.
Leading the fight against her stepmother is Tchize dos Santos. The 44-year-old former MP for the ruling MPLA party (she was expelled from Parliament due to unexplained long absences and insubordination) has a million followers on Instagram. People love Tchize for her outspokenness and very Angolan jocozenes – her happy-go-lucky nature.
Sometimes she shares photos of Angolan dishes that she cooks while crying out that she misses home.
Sometimes she does some dance twerking routines meant to show off her behind, which, she has often assured the nation, is nothing but her very own flesh. She insists she has never had to see a Brazilian beauty doctor like a good number of women in the Angolan elite.
Every evening, from somewhere in Europe, sometimes from a yacht, Tchize dos Santos also lashes out at João Lourenço and his government.
She insists that it was her father’s dying wish that the UNITA leader, Adalberto Costa Junior, should be elected president. She has even sworn that if she is lying then God should not only strike her dead but her three children as well.
She says that Lourenço wants to be the main protagonist at her father’s funeral. There is a long litany of slights, Tchize claims, that her father suffered due to Lourenço’s desire for revenge.
Tchize dos Santos and her team of lawyers have appealed against the decision of the Spanish court to hand over the body and the war in Spanish courts will go on. Back in Angola more people are tuning in to Instagram to follow the saga.
Image source:Angola24horas
