Death and How To Avoid It - Part Five by Dave Jaffe

               Part Five


     Eduardo dos Santos is getting on in years. He's head of Angola, a sizeable African country whose western border hugs a large part of the south west coast of Africa. Angola is yet another African country whose history is full of conflict. Dos Santos's party the MPLA or in English the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has been in power for many years. It took power in 1975 when the MPLA finally threw out the Portuguese colonizers.
     To get in power in Angola,the MPLA had to fight a vicious war against the Portuguese rulers.Then it had to fight off two other mostly black groups. Last it ended up fending off a U.S. backed army that ravaged Angola for at least ten years.  Final death count from all of this conflict? About two million people.
     "Anatomy is destiny," the famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud once said. Freud's brand of therapy once was called 'The talking therapy and' is no longer so popular. In any case Freud was wrong about anatomy. Anatomy isn't destiny: Geography is.
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    If you're born in Angola you're not going to live a long time. You're probably going to die at about the age of 51. The average Angolan in short has a life span of less than two thirds of the average Canadian. Angola's not alone here. Alongside Angola there are 12 other African countries whose citizens don't live much past 50 years either.
      Now Angola shouldn't be poor and if it wasn't,  its citizens would live a lot longer. It's a country chockful of oil, diamonds and other valuable minerals. Its government alas is one of he most corrupt governments on earth. And its rulers who were once gun toting Marxists, are very rich and now support free enterprise to the hilt.
In Luanda, Angola's capital city, millions of people just struggle to survive. Meanwhile Angola's small ruling clique are very rich multi-millionaires. The 21 million people of Angola teach us a valuable lesson: Luck often determines whether we live a long life or don't.
      "I go to where I'm at,  all by myself." one rich man told me at a political meeting. "I worked hard to make my money and no government has the right to take it away from me." Like many other rich and not so rich Canadians, this man ignores how lucky he's been. If he'd have been born a black Angolan, he'd either have been dead by nowor would be eking out a bare existence in some impoverished village or just surviving in an urban slum. Instead he's driving around Vancouver in an expensive Audi. Luck doesn't figure in his calculations. Yet it should.