Mainza Chona

Mainza Mathias Chona (21 June 1930–11 December 2001) was born Sikaye Chingula Namukamba on 21 January 1930 at Nampeyo, near Monze in the southern province of Northern Rhodesia. He was a Zambian politician. His father was Hameja Chilala, Chief Chona. His mother, Nhandu (Chinyama), was one of his father's five wives.

Chona had his primary education at Chona out-school in Nampeyo (established by the Jesuit mission at his father's request), and at Chikuni (the Jesuit headquarters). It was at Chikuni that Chona became a Catholic. After completing his secondary education at Munali Secondary School in Lusaka in 1951, he worked as an interpreter at the High Court in Livingstone, but his ambition was to become a lawyer.

He served as Prime Minister of the country on two occasions from 25 August 1973 to 27 May 1975 and 20 July 1977 to 15 June 1978.

Other than serving as Prime Minister, Chona held various government positions including Justice Minister (1964-1968), Home Affairs Minister (1968-1969), Minister of Legal Affairs and Attorney-general (1975-1978). He was Secretary-general of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) from 1978 to 1981 and was Zambia's ambassador to the People's Republic of China from 1984 to 1989.

He died in Johannesburg, South Africa at the age of 71. No other Zambian has held more political positions than Chona.

In 1955 he went to London on a scholarship, studied at Gray's Inn, and was called to the bar in 1958. While in England he associated himself with African nationalist visitors, including Harry Nkumbula and Kenneth Kaunda, and with London-based supporters of the nationalist cause, such as Simon Zukas, and Doris Lessing, who described him as ‘the promising young poet of the assembly, full of charming idealisms …’ (Lessing, 183–4). It was while in England that he adopted the name Mathias Mainza Chona by deed poll.

Chona returned to Northern Rhodesia in December 1958. The African National Congress (ANC) had split in the previous October when Kenneth Kaunda formed the breakaway Zambia African National Congress (ZANC), Harry Nkumbula remaining leader of the ANC. Although he had been a member of the ANC while in London, Chona does not seem to have made his choice between the two factions before Kaunda and other leaders of the new party were detained, and the ZANC itself was banned, in March 1959. He then became active in the still-legal ANC, but his challenge to Nkumbula's cautious leadership of the party resulted in a further split. In October 1959 Chona became the first president of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), the successor to ZANC. He saw himself as a caretaker leader and stepped down when Kaunda was released from prison in January 1960. He was elected deputy president at a conference later in the month, but left the country to avoid a charge of sedition; he remained in London as the party's overseas representative for over a year. He served as a UNIP delegate to the Federal Review Conference in London in December 1960 and returned home in February 1961. He was elected national secretary of the party in June 1961—a post he held for eight years. He played a major role in securing the short-lived alliance between UNIP and the ANC in January 1963. He became an MP and minister of justice in UNIP's pre-independence government in January 1964, and minister of home affairs at independence in October 1964. He held no less than five different ministerial appointments, including minister without portfolio, between 1966 and 1969, when he was made ambassador to the United States. He became vice-president in November 1970.

Chona played a leading part in the organization of UNIP before and after independence, but he is perhaps best remembered for the Chona commission, which was set up under his chairmanship in February 1972 to make recommendations for the constitution of a ‘one-party participatory democracy’. President Kaunda had decided to establish a one-party state in December 1971 after the banning of Simon Kapwepwe's United Progressive Party and the detention of its leader. The commission's terms of reference did not permit it to discuss the pros and cons of this decision. The surviving opposition party, the ANC, boycotted the commission and unsuccessfully challenged the constitutional change in the courts. The Chona report, which was based on four months of public hearings and submitted in October 1972, was, nevertheless, widely regarded as a ‘liberal’ document. The second republic was inaugurated in December 1972, but the national assembly did not approve the new constitution until August 1973. This asserted the supremacy of the party, but did not include the commission's more liberal recommendations, which would have limited detention without trial, restricted the president to two five-year terms, and shared the president's executive powers with a prime minister. They would also have required electoral competition for the post of president, and prevented him from vetoing parliamentary candidates. Although many of the report's recommendations were ignored, it had a lasting influence: it was cited during the debate on the return to multi-party democracy in 1990–91, and again during the campaign to stop President Chiluba running for a third term in 2001.

Chona was prime minister, a new post that was clearly subordinate to that of president, from 1973 to 1975. He served for a second time from 1977 to 1978 after a spell as minister of legal affairs and attorney-general. He became secretary-general of UNIP in 1978 and remained in that position, which ranked second to that of president, until February 1981. Kaunda never explained to him the reasons for his sudden removal from this post, but by the later 1970s he seemed to be out of sympathy with at least some of Kaunda's policies. In particular he was seen as the leader within the central committee of a group that successfully opposed Kaunda's promotion of ‘scientific socialism’, or Marxism, as an ideology allied to Zambian ‘humanism’. After he was dropped from the central committee, he at first resisted appointment as ambassador to China and returned to private practice. He finally agreed to go to Beijing in 1984 and spent five years there in what was seen by many, probably including himself, as a period of exile and as a punishment posting. He would have liked to return to Zambia at the end of his term in China, but was transferred to Paris, where he served as ambassador from 1989 to 1992. On his return to Zambia he again entered private practice. He was associated as a lawyer with the Oasis Forum which successfully opposed Chiluba's attempt to run for a third term as president.

Mainza Chona was widely respected in Zambia as a good administrator and as Kaunda's loyal lieutenant, whose modesty and self-deprecating humour concealed his real ability. He appeared to lack personal ambition, but made a major contribution to the organization of UNIP and the struggle for independence. He played a controversial part in establishing the one-party state, but was typically shrewd in producing a report on the subject that in some respects stood the test of time. He did not enrich himself through political office and never lost the common touch. He had a deep interest in Tonga culture, language, and history—his Chitonga novel, Kabuca Uleta Tunji, was awarded the Margaret Wrong medal in 1956—but he was not a chauvinist. A devoted family man, who remained a devout Catholic, he married Yolanta Chimbamu Mainza (b. 1936) in May 1953, and they had two boys and five girls. His daughter Elizabeth Muyovwe was a judge of the High Court. His brother Mark Chona also played a prominent part in Zambian political and public life. Chona died at Milpark Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa, on 11 December 2001, while undergoing dialysis. He was buried on 16 December in Monze, Zambia.

References

D. C. Mulford, Zambia: the politics of independence, 1957–1964 (1967)

C. Gertzel, C. Baylies, and M. Szeftel, The dynamics of the one-party state in Zambia (1984)

E. Colson, The history of Nampeyo (Lusaka, 1991)

J. J. Grotpeter, B. V. Siegel, and J. R. Pletcher, Historical dictionary of Zambia, 2nd edn (1998)

D. Lessing, Walking in the shade: volume two of my autobiography, 1949–1962 (1997)

S. Wina, The night without a president (1985)

S. Zukas, Into exile and back (2002) · K. Mlenga, ed., Who's who in Zambia, 1967–68 [1968]