BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau — Just after sunset, the general got up from under his favorite mango tree. As he climbed toward his second-floor office, a remote-controlled bomb under the staircase exploded, crumpling the building’s flank into a jumble of rubble.
His nemesis, the president, died less than 12 hours later, after heavily armed men fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the front door of his house. They shot and hacked to death the man who had ruled this tiny West African nation for 23 of its 35 years of existence, leaving behind sprays of blood, a rusty machete and bullet casings.
In almost any other place in the world, the death of a democratically elected president and the chief of the armed forces would be met with horror. But in this former Portuguese colony, the brutal murders of President João Bernardo Vieira and Gen. Batista Tagme Na Waie have been greeted with not just equanimity but optimism.
“Good riddance to both of them,” said Armando Mango, a lawyer in Bissau. “We have been held hostage by these guys for too long.”
Even outsiders used to worrying over this country’s perpetually grim prospects had to agree.
“I know it seems crazy,” one Western diplomat here said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “But this might be the best shot at stability that Guinea-Bissau has had in a long time.”
The events that have unfolded here in the past week are so improbable they could easily have been ripped from a cheap spy thriller. Some whispered that the South American cocaine barons who had transformed Guinea-Bissau into a drug trafficking haven had ordered the killings.
Others speculated that the decades-old struggle between the country’s two most powerful men ended up consuming them both. They were first comrades in the liberation struggle against Portugal, then uneasy allies and ultimately rivals for power over this impoverished and conflict-prone nation.
Mr. Vieira, who was universally known by his nom du guerre, Nino, and General Tagme Na Waie, have dominated each chapter of the country’s history, a chronicle of misery so absurd and acute it is almost a composite caricature of the post-colonial African state.
Guinea-Bissau declared its independence in 1973 after a ferocious guerrilla war that left the country shattered, then suffered through disastrous experiments with a Marxist-inflected military dictatorship under Mr. Vieira. There were attempted coups and brutal repression. In the 1990s there were attempts at democracy, then a civil war and ruin. Successful elections in 2005 brought Mr. Vieira back into power, but a free ballot has not stopped the slide.
The drug trade is the nation’s new scourge. According to United Nations officials, as much as $1 billion a year of cocaine is funneled through the country en route to Europe. Both Mr. Vieira and General Tagme Na Waie were suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, according to diplomats and analysts in the region, an allegation their supporters vehemently denied.
But even before the drug traffickers came along, the rivalry between the men had destabilized Guinea-Bissau politics for decades.
“It is pretty simple,” said Jan van Maanen, a Dutch businessman who also serves as honorary consul for the Netherlands and Britain in Bissau. “Nino did not like Tagme, and Tagme hated Nino.”
This mutual loathing had both personal and tribal roots. General Tagme Na Waie was from the Balante tribe, which dominates the army. Mr. Vieira came from the less important Papel tribe. The general claimed that Mr. Vieira’s government had once tortured him by shocking his testicles with an electric device. Mr. Vieira suspected the general of undermining his power and threatening his rule.
Officially there are two commissions investigating the assassinations, but no one expects them to be solved. Mr. Vieira’s home was looted after his death. Two battered pieces of electrical equipment suspected of being components of the bomb that killed the general sit in a black plastic bag at military headquarters.
Relatives of the general and fellow soldiers said that Mr. Vieira had ordered his killing, but others argue that the relative sophistication of the assassination points to a foreign connection. Government officials said that a group of soldiers angry about General Tagme Na Waie’s death killed the president.
The rivalry between the men was as self-contained as it was acute. It did not take long for life to return to what passes for normal in a country where one in five children will not live to their fifth birthday.
The flags were lowered to half-staff, but shops quickly reopened. Few people wanted or could afford to mourn two men who made it well past the country’s average life expectancy of 45.8 years.
“We are just surviving,” said João Pereira, who shines shoes outside one of the city’s few hotels. “It doesn’t matter who is in power, our life stays the same.”
Bissau is a city almost outside of time, a place where progress halted decades ago. Graceful ruins of Portugal’s colonial reign here line potholed streets, slowly blackening in the tropical swelter.
Weeds sprout from the windows of the Presidential Palace, fed by sunshine and rain that pour into the collapsed roof. The building was damaged in the country’s civil war, which ended in 1999, and the country is too poor to fix it.
The country’s tiny economy is based on cashews and fish, and two-thirds of its people live in penury. The government is perpetually strapped. Civil servants go months without pay. Teenagers are stuck in grade school because the teachers are so often on strike.
Guinea-Bissau’s neighbors say they worry that West Africa is headed for a new era of instability and conflict. Regional leaders expressed outrage at the assassinations, which seemed of a piece with the coup that followed the death of the president of neighboring Guinea. An amphibious assault on a third country, Equatorial Guinea, aimed at toppling its government, recently failed.
But in Bissau, an odd inversion of this pattern has taken place. The country seems if anything more stable in the aftermath of the assassinations. The military did not seize power. The speaker of the national assembly, Raimundo Pereira, was sworn in as president, as required by the Constitution. The government is preparing for new elections.
Fears remain that the military could yet intervene, or that the new government will be even more vulnerable to corruption. Zamora Induta, a spokesman for the country’s powerful military, said the armed forces would stay out of the transition.
It is hard to imagine how life in Guinea-Bissau could get much worse, said Mr. Mango, the lawyer.
“This was a quarrel between two big men,” he said. “Now that they are dead maybe the country finally has a chance to start fresh.”
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