At a Glance
The Lawyer as Independence Builder: A Specific Contribution
The independence movements of British colonial Africa produced several distinct types of political actors, each with a different kind of contribution to make to the liberation project. The charismatic mass leaders — those whose personal authority and communicative gifts could mobilise mass popular support — were essential for the political momentum that independence required. The grassroots organisers who built party branches, recruited members, and maintained the human infrastructure of the movement were no less essential for the substance behind the momentum. And then there were the lawyers and constitutional thinkers — the people whose understanding of legal argument, institutional design, and the formal structures of governance gave the movement its ability to engage with the colonial system on the system's own terms, and who would eventually be responsible for building the legal architecture of the independent state.
Mainza Chona was among the most significant of this third type in the Zambian independence movement. His training at the English Bar — obtained through a process that required both intellectual achievement and the financial resources to study in London, resources that very few Northern Rhodesian Africans of his generation possessed — gave him legal credentials and legal capabilities that were genuinely scarce in the territory. The scarcity made his skills valuable: the nationalist movement needed lawyers to defend its members against colonial prosecution, to argue constitutional cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and to engage with the complex legal arguments that the constitutional negotiations producing independence required. Chona provided these services.
The practical legal work of defending nationalist politicians and activists was itself a form of political contribution — not only because it kept individuals out of prison who would otherwise have been imprisoned, but because it demonstrated that the colonial legal system could be used against the colonial administration's political purposes, that the rule of law was a resource for the independence movement as well as for its opponents. The colonial government's claim to be administering a territory under the rule of law was tested and sometimes challenged by the legal advocacy that Chona and his few African lawyer contemporaries provided.
Constitutional Architecture: The One-Party State's Legal Form
The Chona Commission — the constitutional commission that examined Zambia's political arrangements in 1972 and produced the framework for the one-party participatory democracy that was declared at the end of that year — was the most consequential constitutional work of Chona's career, and the most morally and politically ambiguous. The commission was asked to give constitutional form to a decision that had already been made politically — the decision to establish UNIP as the sole legal political party and to restructure Zambia's governmental arrangements accordingly. The work was therefore constrained from the beginning by the political premise it was asked to elaborate rather than evaluate.
Within those constraints, the commission did attempt to think seriously about the specific constitutional questions that a one-party state raised. If there was to be only one party, how could citizens exercise meaningful political participation? What mechanisms would allow for genuine competition of ideas within the single-party framework? How would accountability be maintained when electoral competition between parties — the primary accountability mechanism in multiparty democracy — was no longer available? The commission's answers to these questions produced the participatory structures of the one-party system: primary elections within UNIP that gave citizens a choice between UNIP candidates, a strengthened National Assembly with members who were expected to hold the executive to account even within the single-party framework, and various consultative mechanisms that were supposed to give citizens genuine input into policy.
Whether these mechanisms actually provided the accountability they promised is a different question from whether they were seriously designed. The historical record suggests that the one-party system's participatory structures were less effective in practice than in constitutional theory — that the dominance of the party executive over the formal institutional structures meant that the accountability mechanisms rarely constrained the government in practice. But the effort to design participatory mechanisms within the one-party framework reflected the constitutionalist's instinct that governance should be conducted through formal rules and institutional procedures even in conditions of political monopoly, and that instinct — however inadequate to the constitutional challenge it faced — was Chona's characteristic contribution.
The Southern Province Base and Ethnic Politics
Chona's political base in the Southern Province — the region of Ila and Tonga communities that had historically been most closely associated with Harry Nkumbula's ANC — gave his political career a specific ethnic and regional dimension that complicated his relationship with both UNIP and with the communities he represented. His decision to align with UNIP rather than the ANC — to cast his lot with Kaunda's national movement rather than the regionally concentrated southern organisation — was both a political judgment about which movement would prevail and a principled commitment to the idea that Zambia's nationalism should transcend regional and ethnic divisions.
The tension between national politics and regional representation was one that every Zambian politician of the independence era navigated with varying degrees of success. The Southern Province's predominantly Tonga and Ila communities had specific political concerns — about land, about development resource allocation, about their relationship to the predominantly northern-based UNIP leadership — that were legitimate and that Chona, as the most senior southern politician in the Kaunda government, was expected to represent. Doing so while maintaining the pan-ethnic national commitment that UNIP embodied was a constant balancing act.
The political significance of the Southern Province's relationship with UNIP was also affected by the broader dynamics of Zambia's ethnic politics — the competition between northern and eastern region communities for influence within UNIP, the periodic accusations that the government favoured particular ethnic communities in appointment and development spending, and the underlying question of whether a genuinely national political culture could be built from the diverse communities that colonial boundaries had grouped together as Northern Rhodesia. Chona's presence in the most senior levels of the Kaunda government was one of the mechanisms through which the government's claim to national representation across ethnic lines was maintained — a form of political work that was valuable even when the institutional form through which it was done, the one-party state, was itself constitutionally problematic.
The Democratic Transition and Constitutional Continuity
Chona lived to see the democratic transition of the early 1990s — the restoration of multiparty democracy and the 1991 elections that ended the Kaunda era — and his legal and constitutional background gave him a particular perspective on the transition's institutional dimensions. The challenge of moving from a one-party constitutional framework to a multiparty one required constitutional revision, legal reform, and the reconstruction of the institutional mechanisms that genuine political competition required. The Chona Commission's work on the one-party constitution, whatever its political compromises, had at least maintained the habit of constitutional thinking — the idea that governance should be conducted through formal legal frameworks rather than purely through political power — and that habit was useful in the transition period.
The degree to which the constitutional architecture of the one-party period facilitated or complicated the democratic transition is itself a question that constitutional historians of Zambia have addressed with varying conclusions. Some argue that the formal institutional structures maintained during the one-party period — the National Assembly, the judiciary, the formal legal framework of the state — provided a foundation for the democratic transition that made it more orderly than it might otherwise have been. Others argue that the one-party constitution's concentration of power in the executive and the party had produced institutional atrophy that the transition had to overcome rather than build on.
Both perspectives have merit, and the truth is probably that the transition was shaped by both dimensions — building on some institutional continuities while having to overcome others. Chona's contribution to the institutional framework that existed at the point of transition was genuine, even if the framework he had helped build in the one-party period was in some ways an obstacle as well as a foundation for the democratic institutions that followed.
The Unsung Institutionalist
Mainza Chona died in 2001, a year after the centenary of Zambia's establishment as a colonial territory and thirty-seven years after the independence he had helped to bring about. His death was mourned without the extensive international attention that the deaths of more publicly celebrated figures attract — a reflection of the general truth that institutional contributions are less visible than political and charismatic ones, and that the people who give governance its legal form are rarely as celebrated as those who provide its political energy.
This relative invisibility is a distortion of the historical record. The legal and constitutional thinking that Chona brought to the Zambian independence movement and to the governance of the independent state was a genuine and important contribution. Without lawyers who understood constitutional architecture, independence movements produce governments that cannot translate their political vision into workable institutional arrangements. Without constitutionalists who maintain the habit of formal legal thinking even under one-party conditions, the transition back to constitutional democracy is harder and more disruptive than it needs to be.
Mainza Chona was not a perfect figure — no one who served in the Kaunda government through the one-party period can claim an uncomplicated democratic credential — and the Chona Commission's contribution to the constitutional framework of the one-party state is the most significant entry on the negative side of his ledger. But the full account of his career, including his legal advocacy in the independence period and his institutional contribution to the formal architecture of the Zambian state, is a contribution worth recognising as part of the broader story of how independent Zambia was built and how it eventually found its way to the democratic institutions that the independence movement had originally promised.