'Black Rooster' slain

Savimbi's unexpected death breathes new life into Angola's stalled peace process, writes Gamal Nkrumah
Last week's sudden death from his battle wounds of Jonas Savimbi, leader of the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA), marks a new, less volatile phase in southern African politics. Savimbi's death, announced last Friday, presents a challenge to the people and leadership of Angola to forge a prosperous and democratic future in an economically strategic, albeit impoverished and politically unstable ,region. But, to succeed Angola must arrive at a national consensus and secure the political determination to do so.
The Angolan government, nevertheless, needs sustained assistance if it is to begin to fully control its national territory. UNITA is a spent force. There are no leaders-in-waiting, and the movement is split into rival factions with opposing political agendas. There are those in UNITA who want reconciliation with the government and hope for some form of power-sharing with the ruling Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in a national unity government.
Embroiled in a ferocious zero-sum game with his MPLA foes and their Cuban and Soviet backers, Savimbi embodied all that was wrong with the Africa of the Cold War era. When the end of the Cold War signalled that times had changed, Savimbi obstinately refused to change with the times. With Savimbi dead, the Angolan government is now free to win over the prickly and fragile political egos of its political opponents while creatively engaging them in the country's political process.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged "all stakeholders" in Angola's future to "take advantage" of Savimbi's death. Amara Essy, the Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), concurred. But it is the Southern African Development Community, a regional political and economic grouping that includes Angola, that is set to play a key role in the process of national reconciliation in Angola.
Most observers predict UNITA's disintegration and demise. Savimbi was UNITA, and his death can only accelerate the slow process of UNITA's dissolution, set in motion following a series of military setbacks in the aftermath of the UN- brokered peace deal signed between the MPLA government and UNITA in the Zambian capital Lusaka, in November 1994.
Savimbi's UNITA fed on the superpower rivalry of the Cold War era, even taking advantage of the Sino-Soviet split. Gradually, however, the movement and its leader became increasingly irrelevant. The sad truth was that in the past decade UNITA was sustained almost exclusively through the sheer tenacity and force of Savimbi's character. At least two generations of Angolans suffered the terrible consequences of his delusions of grandeur. His convoluted political ambitions tragically impacted on millions of his compatriots whose lives were ruined by a pointless war.
Unlike Zimbabwe's veteran, Joshua Nkomo -- who accepted for the sake of peace to play second fiddle to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe despite considering him to be his minion -- Savimbi refused to be second after Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, currently on a state visit to the United States to discuss prospects for peace in post-Savimbi Angola. He indignantly turned down an offer by the MPLA government to become vice president. The vice presidency was beneath him, he confided to close aides and those few remaining friends he trusted.
The US is poised to play a critical role in the political future of Angola -- one of its major African crude oil suppliers. Angola is fabulously rich in natural resources. Oiled by petroleum exports, the Angolan economy also thrives on the export of diamonds, gold and other minerals. An estimated $1 million worth of diamonds are illegally smuggled out of Angola, destined for Belgium and Israel. Angola is also a major coffee, timber and fish producer and exporter. Its relatively sparse population, depleted by centuries of slave trading and the attendant internecine tribal fighting, today ensures that it has a relatively high per-capita income of $1,000 -- by African continental standards. The tragedy is that the country's wealth is unevenly distributed. The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that three million Angolans currently need emergency food aid. But Angola, which is twice the size of Texas, is littered with landmines and the country has one of the world's highest rates of disabled people.
Savimbi was a bad loser. His reckless quest for power meant death, displacement and starvation for millions of Angolans and led to his being branded a Western stooge, while he continued the charade of being a revolutionary and yearned for the accolades that he felt he deserved as a true African nationalist.
One of his four wives was wounded with him in battle. His bullet-riddled corpse was gruesomely exhibited on national television as many Angolans found it hard to believe that he was really dead.
Eugenio Ngolo "Manuvakola," leader of the breakaway UNITA-Renovada, hopes to garner the sorry remnants of the once proud and powerful UNITA that Savimbi single-handedly moulded. He faces an uphill task. Leadership is supposed to pass, automatically, to deputy president Antonio Dembo but he is neither the brilliant military strategist that Savimbi was nor does he exude the charisma that UNITA's slain leader undoubtedly possessed. Paulo Lukamba Gato, another of Savimbi's top aides, fares no better and cannot muster an impressive following. Still, UNITA-Renovade is upbeat. "The nightmare has ended and the future has just begun," Dinho Chinguunji, the organisation's US spokesman told reporters. UNITA's Jaka Jamba, deputy speaker of the Angolan parliament, has uttered similarly optimistic and reconciliatory remarks. A sigh of relief, then, from friends and foes alike.
The chief reason for everyone's exultation is that most Angolans are sick and tired of war. Angolan President dos Santos, on an official visit to the former colonial power Portugal, once said that he wanted to end the civil war as soon as possible and promised to hold elections within two years. "We aim to build bridges so that we can achieve, as soon as possible, a cease-fire that permits the demilitarisation of UNITA," Dos Santos said.
Born in 1934 in Bie province, central Angola, Savimbi founded UNITA in Muangai in March 1966. No armchair intellectual, Savimbi left his studies in Europe in the 1960s to go to Mao's China for military training. Despite imbibing the ideological indoctrination, he had no qualms about fighting Communism in Africa two decades later. The Chinese supported his anti-Soviet stance and he became a thorn in the flesh of the 30,000 Cuban troops dispatched to Angola to prop up the MPLA regime that had been armed to the teeth with Soviet weaponry. Angola became the setting of one of the bitterest Cold War proxy conflicts.
Savimbi was hailed by former US president Ronald Reagan as a "freedom fighter." He received the red-carpet treatment in Washington and had numerous powerful supporters in the US. In 1986, Reagan welcomed Savimbi to the White House where he was treated as a hero and showered with honours befitting a visiting head of state. Ironically, for a self-proclaimed Maoist who was equally at home in Maosit suits and his trademark battle fatigues, Savimbi was feted as an anti-Marxist combatant in apartheid South Africa and much of Western Europe.
"The Black Rooster," Savimbi's nickname, had racial overtones. The mixed-race people, pejoratively referred to as mulattos or mesticos in whose veins runs both the blood of white colonisers and their black subjects, dominate Angola's coastal regions. Savimbi had an instinctive disdain of Angola's mixed-race elite, and he was never comfortable living in the capital, Luanda, a traditional stronghold of mixed-race Angolans. They spoke no African language and were thoroughly Europeanised in culture, adopting Portuguese surnames, as Dos Santos did. In sharp contrast, Savimbi the son of a station master, was proud of his African ancestry. He charged that Luanda's mixed-race elite looked down on black Africans -- whom he always stressed that he represented. They despised and rejected African cultural traditions or, worse, felt threatened by African culture. Savimbi projected himself as the champion of pure and unadulterated traditional Africa -- a true son of the soil. Needless to say, his critics in the MPLA dismissed these charges as ludicrous and malicious. Savimbi's remains were unceremoniously buried under a tree near where he was killed. His warrior death, with his gun in hand, will no doubt perpetuate the carefully-cultivated myth he spun around himself. Savimbi's sentiments deliberately echo those of a sizeable number of southern Africans. His almost pathological hatred for the mixed-race elite which he considered to be illegitimately monopolising power in Luanda and maintaining a stranglehold over the MPLA, is shared by many, both in Angola and in neighbouring southern African countries. Savimbi's racial appeal was his trump card.
Unfortunately for Savimbi, playing on anti- mixed race sentiment failed to win the hearts and minds of the Angolan masses. UNITA, he declared, stood for the philosophy of Negritude, or black African nationalism. Moreover, Negritude camouflaged serious ethnic tensions, which Savimbi deliberately did not try to paper over. Indeed, he pandered to ethnic sensibilities and openly confessed to being a tribalist. Angola, like many other African countries is multi-ethnic and its people are divided by rival ethnic and tribal loyalties.
Angola's most lurid fault-line is tribal. With the departure of the Portuguese colonists in 1976, ethnic, and not necessarily racial, divisions held sway. Savimbi ruthlessly tried to manipulate to his own political advantage the ambiguities arising from this contradiction. In the end, his policy produced no dividend.
Savimbi reluctantly signed a peace agreement with Dos Santos in Bicesse, Portugal, in May 1991, paving the way for elections 16 months later. UNITA lost. Savimbi protested, complaining of vote-rigging. The international community largely ignored him and in 1992, a vengeful and by now desperate Savimbi resumed the civil war, "misjudging the [new post-Cold War] situation," as Dos Santos perceptively put it.
Caught in this destructive web, Savimbi wilfully wrecked six weeks of peace talks in the Ivory Coast in 1993 and the UN imposed an oil and arms embargo on UNITA in retaliation. Worse was to follow, with a complete reversal of Savimbi's fortunes. Former US president Bill Clinton recognised the MPLA government and severed old ties with UNITA. A disdainful and megalomaniac Savimbi announced the establishment of his capital in Huambo, the heartland of the Ovimbundu people of central Angola -- another miscalculation as their support was not forthcoming.
Towards the end, many of Savimbi's closest associates had deserted him, and he could no longer count on the backing of his powerful foreign friends and benefactors. In his bitterness, he failed to grasp the opportunities presented and doggedly insisted on being installed president of Angola. Savimbi and his African patrons like Ivory Coast's first president Felix Houphet- Boigney who passed away, and Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seku, was overthrown and died in exile in 1997. Savimbi refused to read the writing on the wall until the bitter end.
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