J onas Savimbi, who has died aged 67, was, for 20 years, a figure as important in southern Africa as Nelson Mandela, and as negative a force as Mandela was positive. For the past 10 years, using the proceeds of smuggled diamonds from eastern and central Angola, he fought an increasingly pointless and personal bush war against the elected government in which hundreds of thousands of peasants were killed, wounded, displaced, or starved to death. His death in fighting in the eastern province of Moxico was greeted with celebrations in the Angolan capital, Luanda.
It was a long fall from his heyday in the 1980s, when Chester Crocker, the longest serving US assistant secretary of state, and the Reagan administration's top official for Africa described him as "one of the most talented and charismatic of leaders in modern African history". Savimbi was the toast of the Reagan White House, feted by the rightwing establishment in many countries and a friend to African tyrants. He was a willing tool of the cold war, the key figure in America's and apartheid South Africa's destruction of independent Angola's nationalist ambitions, and responsible for suffering and death on a scale barely comprehensible outside his ruined country.
He was born in the central Angolan town of Munhango, the son of the first black station master in the Portuguese colonial period. His father was also one of the early converts by American Protestant missionaries, and Jonas went to a missionary school. He showed great determination and intelligence in getting a secondary schooling that was extremely rare for black children at the time, then got a scholarship to Lisbon to study medicine.
In the late 1950s, Portugal's underground opposition to the fascist regime was led by communists. Savimbi inevitably became involved in politics and, like most Angolan students, attracted the attention of the Portuguese secret police (PIDE). He left the country secretly, with the aid of the Communist party network, and was sheltered by the French Communist party.
Savimbi rejected several offers of scholarships in Moscow and fell back on the missionaries for a scholarship that enabled him to resume his studies in Switzerland. In the early 1960s he flirted with the various Angolan independence movements, at one point joining the youth wing of the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Then he fell prey to the influence of the Kenyan Tom Mboya - suspected even at the time of being a CIA agent - and began to show the anti-Soviet and racist tendencies that would be the hallmark of his own movement. He switched allegiance to the UPA-FNLA, but then quarrelled with the leadership.
His own movement, Unita, was conceived in 1964 with Antonio da Costa Fernandes, who would be his closest colleague until they split dramatically in 1992. The movement was formally launched inside Angola in 1966, and armed actions against the Portuguese began on December 25 1966.
However, apparently unknown to others in the top Unita leadership, Savimbi's ambition and calculation for the future had brought him into secret contact with the Portuguese military by the early 1970s. Unita was definitely more involved in fighting the rival MPLA than in a serious challenge to Portugal. The PIDE archive opened after the Portugese revolution revealed a signed collaboration pact between Savimbi and Portuguese authorities which dealt a serious blow to Savimbi's credibility.
But, as Angolan independence promised by the new revolutionary government in Portugal grew closer, and it appeared that the leftwing MPLA were likely to take power, Savimbi became a tool for US and South African interests which wanted to prevent the MPLA from controlling such a wealthy and strategic African country. John Stockwell was the CIA agent in charge of cobbling together an opposition that could be funded and supplied out of the US embassy in the Zairean capital, Kinshasa. He was dismayed by the incompetence of Unita, but, given the weakness of the FNLA, already backed by the US, went to work with a will to build it up into the anti-communist alternative to the MPLA with its Cuban and Soviet backers. In 1975, at the behest of Henry Kissinger, $24.7m of covert military assistance was approved for Unita.
But despite a massive South African military invasion through Namibia up to the coast in an attempt to take Luanda, and a pincer movement from the north with Zairean troops and white mercenaries on behalf of the FNLA and Unita, the arrival of Cuban troops in Operation Carlota saved the MPLA and its newly established independent government.
With Unita publicly discredited by its links with the apartheid regime, the CIA and the mercenaries, Savimbi's political career appeared to be over. But he was saved by the cold war and his usefulness to the US and South Africa. His intelligence and charisma made him easy to sell to international audiences as the democratic leader Africa needed.
By the end of the 1980s his proxy army, supplied and funded by the CIA and aided by numerous South African invasions, had sabotaged much of Angola. Swathes of the countryside were cut off from agriculture by minefields, mine victims and malnourished children swamped the hospitals and tens of thousands of children were also kidnapped by Unita troops and taken to Unita-controlled areas in the south around Savimbi's capital at Jamba.
Appalling rites, such as public burning of women said to be witches, characterised the reign of terror in which many of Savimbi's close associates were imprisoned or killed on his orders.
US pressure brought the Angolan government to accept a peace agreement at Bicesse in 1991 that required both sides to disarm and demobilise before a UN-monitored election in 1992. Washington was confident that Savimbi would win the election. But in February 1992 his oldest associate, Antonio da Costa Fernandes, and another leading Unita cadre, Nzau Puna, defected, declaring publicly that Savimbi was not interested in a political ontest, but was preparing another war. However, so strong were US ties to Savimbi that those warnings and others were disregarded.
He launched a catastrophic new war when he lost the election in late September, and came close to seizing power in the following months. The UN allowed Savimbi to play for time with numerous meaningless negotiations in various capi tals while its supply planes were shot at, cities besieged, hundreds of thousands of people fled from Unita, and the death toll from starvation and mines grew higher than ever. The UN secretary general's special representative, Malian diplomat Alioune Blondin Beye, was killed in a plane crash. Savimbi's generals had boasted after the election that they would turn Angola into a new Somalia, and they came close.
In 2000, the UN put sanctions on Unita's leadership, at last making a real contribution to isolating him. A UN report detailed the important role of smuggled diamonds in fuelling the war, but Savimbi had stockpiles of the gems and shady alliances that allowed him to hold the country to ransom.
Despite all this the government made repeated overtures to him to come back into the political process. Those who knew him always said he would only accept one place in Luanda - the president's. His own destructive folly since 1992 had written that possibility out of the script.
And, with all his old American, European and South African allies long out of power, many of his top men gone over to the MPLA, the government army slowly closing in on the remote province of Moxico, his end on the battlefield had become inevitable.
Savimbi is survived by his wife Catarina, who was wounded in the clash which killed him. He had several wives and many children.
Jonas Malheiro Savimbi, Nationalist leader, born August 3 1934; died February 22 2002