Silence is what comes to define the life and the death of the former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos (1942-2022), who died recently at a hospital in Barcelona, Spain, at the age of 79. Putting it slightly differently, his control of what he said and what he left unsaid defined not only how he lived and governed, but also how he managed the last years of his solitary life.
I previously worked as a journalist in Angola and Portugal. My subsequent PhD in anthropology focused on the interplay between politics, urbanism and kinship in Luanda. I have also published a monograph on the urban transformation of Luanda, the capital city of Angola.
