Jonas Malheiro Savimbi (1934–2002) was the Angolan rebel leader who founded UNITA in 1966 and fought the MPLA government for 27 years until his death in combat on February 22, 2002. He was one of the longest-serving guerrilla leaders of the Cold War and the central figure in the post-1975 phase of the Angolan Civil War. The war that ended with his death had killed perhaps 500,000 Angolans and displaced four million.
Savimbi was born on August 3, 1934 in the Munhango area of Moxico province, the son of a stationmaster on the Benguela Railway and an Ovimbundu protestant. He studied at the Protestant University of Central Africa in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s, then went to Portugal and finally to China, where he trained in communist insurgency methods in 1960–1961. He joined the FNLA on his return to Angola, became its secretary-general in 1961, and then broke with Holden Roberto in 1964 to found a third movement. UNITA — the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola — was launched on March 13, 1966.
The early UNITA was Maoist in doctrine, with strong Chinese material support and a base in the Ovimbundu heartland of the central highlands. By 1974 it had perhaps 3,000 fighters. The Carnation Revolution in Lisbon, which ended Portugal’s colonial war, gave Savimbi a brief opportunity. The Alvor Agreement of January 1975 gave him a place in the transitional government, but he rejected the November 1975 elections and went to war.
Two phases of Savimbi’s war followed. The first, 1975–1976, was a conventional phase in which UNITA, supported by the CIA (then run by William Colby and William Casey), apartheid South Africa, and Zaire, advanced on Luanda and was stopped by the Cuban intervention. The second, 1976–2002, was a long war of guerrilla attrition, financed by UNITA’s seizure of coffee and diamond production in the southeast. The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987–1988 — in which Savimbi’s conventional army, supplied by Pretoria, failed to break the Cuban–Angolan–South African front — was the high-water mark of his conventional capacity.
Savimbi’s political instinct was to internationalize the conflict. He cultivated the Reagan White House from 1981 onward, met Reagan in the Oval Office on January 30, 1986, and was reportedly a recipient of U.S. assistance even after the 1984 Boland restrictions on funds to the Contras in Nicaragua. He saw himself as the leader of a global anti-communist crusade, and he received funds, in violation of U.S. law, from a network of conservative American supporters that included Major Oliver North and the private arms broker Felix Rodriguez. The 1986 Iran-Contra controversy touched Angola as well as Nicaragua.
After 1991, when Cuban troops withdrew and the Bicesse Accords provided for elections, Savimbi lost the 1992 vote to the MPLA’s Eduardo dos Santos and rejected the result. He returned to war in late 1992, holding the central highlands and the diamond areas of Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul for another decade. The Kimberley Process sanctions on UNITA diamonds, established in 2000, dried up the movement’s finances. The FAA (the Angolan army) pushed UNITA into a shrinking zone of operations in Moxico. On February 22, 2002, government troops caught Savimbi’s column near the town of Lucusse and killed him. His death produced an immediate ceasefire and the formal end of the Angolan Civil War.
Savimbi remains a deeply divisive figure in Angola. His UNITA, reconstituted as a parliamentary party, treats him as a national hero. The MPLA government treats him as a war criminal. The academic consensus, reflected in the work of Piero Gleijeses, is that Savimbi was a brilliant tactician whose strategic vision (a multi-ethnic Angola under Ovimbundu leadership, secured by sustained war) was incompatible with both Angolan national interest and the country’s political viability. For more on the Angolan Civil War article.