The Meaning of Law

Edgar Lungu, Political Memory, and the Limits of the Rule of Law

Some legal disputes are difficult because the law is unclear. Others are difficult because the law is being asked to answer a question it was never designed to answer. The dispute surrounding the burial of former Zambian President Edgar Lungu belongs to the second category.

Much of the public discussion has understandably focused on legal questions. Could the state insist upon a state funeral? Should the wishes of the deceased prevail? Which court had jurisdiction? Did the South African courts possess the authority to determine the matter? These are important questions, and constitutional democracies depend upon institutions capable of answering them peacefully.

However, the dispute seemed less about burial than the remarkable number of different people Edgar Lungu appeared to become. A funeral is rarely just a funeral. It is often the final chapter in a public narrative. It becomes the moment in which families, governments, political parties, and ordinary citizens all attempt to answer the same question: who was this person? 

For most of us, those conversations remain private. 

For presidents, they become constitutional.

Throughout the dispute, Edgar Lungu seemed to become several different people at once.

He was a former President.

A political opponent.

A constitutional litigant.

A husband.

A father.

A symbol of the Patriotic Front.

A symbol of the Zambian state.

None of these identities was invented.

None of them was entirely complete.

The dispute gradually became a contest over which version of Edgar Lungu would survive him.

That observation stayed with me because law generally assumes that the person standing before it is relatively stable. Courts identify parties, determine rights, allocate duties, and resolve disputes on the basis that the individuals involved are capable of legal recognition. Outside the courtroom, however, human identity is rarely so straightforward.

Most of us occupy several identities simultaneously.

We are parents and children.

Professionals and friends.

Neighbours and citizens.

To one person we are a source of comfort. To another we are a political opponent. To someone else we may simply become a name in a history book. These identities coexist throughout life because we continue to participate in shaping them. We explain ourselves. We challenge misunderstandings. We reject labels that others impose upon us. However, death changes that relationship entirely. Once someone dies, they lose the ability to identify themselves. Others begin identifying them instead. That sentence may sound obvious, but I think it has profound implications.

Identity does not disappear after death. It changes authors.

For most people, that transition occurs quietly within families and communities. For political leaders, it becomes a matter of national importance. Death transforms political figures into historical figures, and history has never been a neutral record of facts. History is an argument about significance. It is a continual process through which societies decide which events matter, which people should be remembered, and what those memories ought to mean. Political leaders rarely remain the same people in death that they were in life. Their achievements are reassessed. Their failures are reinterpreted. Their motives are debated. Each generation asks different questions of them and, in doing so, constructs a slightly different version of the same individual.

Zambia’s own political history demonstrates this remarkably well. Kenneth Kaunda, Frederick Chiluba, Levy Mwanawasa, Michael Sata, Rupiah Banda, and now Edgar Lungu all occupy complicated places within Zambia’s national story. None can be reduced to a single narrative. Each represents different things to different generations, different political communities, and different moments in the country’s history. Their identities continue to evolve long after they have left office because the societies remembering them continue to evolve as well.

This is not unique to Zambia. It is simply how political memory works.

History does not preserve people exactly as they were. It continually interprets them. Zambia’s constitutional history reflects this process of reinterpretation. Kenneth Kaunda, for example, occupies a comparatively settled place within the nation’s political imagination. Although historians continue to debate aspects of his presidency, his position as the country’s founding president provides a broadly shared framework through which his legacy is understood. Edgar Lungu’s legacy is different. His death occurred while political disagreements concerning his presidency, constitutional eligibility, and relationship with the state remained unresolved. Unlike Kaunda, Lungu entered history before public consensus about his political identity had emerged. The burial dispute therefore became more than a disagreement about funeral arrangements. It became one of the first arenas in which competing versions of Edgar Lungu’s historical legacy were negotiated. Perhaps this is why the dispute lingered in my mind long after I had finished reading the latest court decision. It was not simply unfolding against the backdrop of Zambia’s political history. It had become part of the process through which that history was being written.

The dispute assumed there existed a single Edgar Lungu whose interests could be identified, represented, and protected. Yet every argument advanced throughout the controversy depended upon selecting one identity over another. 

The government’s argument rested primarily upon Edgar Lungu the former President. 

The family’s argument rested primarily upon Edgar Lungu the husband and father.

Supporters and critics invoked different versions again, drawing upon memories of his presidency, his constitutional litigation, his political career, or his private life. The law was never simply deciding between the state and the family. It was deciding between competing legal identities of the same individual. Each claim depended upon a different Edgar Lungu. The dispute therefore required the law to do something it rarely acknowledges explicitly: to determine which identity should become legally significant.

Once that becomes clear, another assumption begins to unravel. Throughout the proceedings, the government repeatedly invoked the public interest. At one level, this seems entirely understandable. Former heads of state occupy a unique constitutional position. Their decisions shape institutions, influence national history, and affect the lives of millions of citizens. It is entirely reasonable to argue that their deaths engage interests extending beyond those of immediate family members.

Yet I found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable with how easily the phrase “public interest” entered the discussion. Not because public interest is unimportant, but because it often sounds far more objective than it really is. Law frequently treats public interest as though it were something waiting to be discovered, almost like a constitutional fact. In reality, public interest is interpreted before it is applied. Governments invoke it. Courts define it. Citizens debate it. Political parties compete over its meaning. What one generation considers essential to the public interest, another may reject entirely. Public interest is therefore not simply a legal principle. It is also a historical and political judgement. To invoke the public interest is not merely to describe society. It is to claim some authority to speak on society’s behalf. 

During his lifetime, Edgar Lungu was frequently treated as an active political actor. Debates concerning presidential eligibility, retirement benefits, constitutional litigation, and opposition politics all relied upon that understanding. Following his death, however, the state’s emphasis shifted. Edgar Lungu increasingly became the former President, the constitutional officeholder, and the national symbol whose burial concerned the nation as a whole. There is nothing inherently improper about that shift. Human beings occupy different identities throughout their lives, and governments are entitled to recognise the constitutional significance of former heads of state. But the shift reveals something important. Public interest depended upon choosing one identity over another. Without Edgar Lungu the former President, the government’s argument becomes considerably weaker. Without Edgar Lungu the husband and father, the family’s argument becomes considerably weaker. Both positions therefore rested upon acts of interpretation before they became arguments about law.

That is why I find it difficult to accept the common portrayal of the dispute as a simple conflict between the state and the family. In reality, they were engaged in remarkably similar projects.

Both claimed legitimacy. Both claimed authority. Both sought to preserve a particular understanding of Edgar Lungu after his death. The difference lay not in what they were doing, but in the source from which each claimed the right to do it. The family drew legitimacy from intimacy, kinship, and the wishes of the deceased. The state drew legitimacy from constitutional office, public symbolism, and national history. Neither claim was obviously illegitimate. Yet neither could demonstrate that its version of Edgar Lungu was the definitive one.

This difficulty reveals something important about the way law operates. Legal systems depend upon categorisation. They constantly ask who a person is in relation to a dispute because rights, duties, and powers often follow from those classifications. Is this person a spouse, a parent, a citizen, a former president, or a private individual? The law cannot avoid these questions because legal consequences depend upon them. Human lives, however, resist neat categorisation. We move between identities throughout our lives, often inhabiting several at once. The Edgar Lungu dispute exposed what happens when those identities point towards different legal and moral conclusions. Before the law could determine who possessed authority, it first had to determine which legal identity mattered most. Yet that was never simply a legal exercise. It was an act of interpretation. That, in my view, is the moment at which the legal dispute quietly transformed into a socio-legal one. The controversy become a dispute about political memory itself.

At this point, it might appear that the law has an obvious role to play. Constitutional democracies exist precisely because they provide institutions capable of resolving disagreement peacefully. If competing actors claim authority over the identity of a former president after death, surely the courts exist to determine whose claim should prevail. In many respects, this is exactly what happened. The dispute moved from public debate into legal institutions, where questions of jurisdiction, authority, and competing rights were subjected to judicial scrutiny. This raises a more fundamental question: what, ultimately, is the law capable of resolving?

Modern constitutional democracies are built upon an extraordinary promise. They assume that conflict need not be settled through force, political dominance, or personal influence. Instead, competing claims are brought before independent courts, where judges determine rights, responsibilities, and authority according to law. It is one of the defining achievements of the rule of law that disagreement can be managed through institutions rather than coercion. The Edgar Lungu dispute demonstrates precisely why that promise matters. Whatever one’s view of the eventual outcome, the controversy remained within the constitutional order. Questions concerning jurisdiction, family autonomy, state authority, and constitutional practice were argued before courts rather than resolved through political confrontation. In that sense, the rule of law worked exactly as it should. Tom Bingham famously argued that questions of legal right and liability should ordinarily be resolved through the application of law rather than arbitrary discretion. Without courts capable of determining legal authority, disputes of this nature would quickly become contests of political power rather than constitutional reasoning. The South African Supreme Court of Appeal ultimately ruled in favour of the family, recognising its authority to determine Edgar Lungu’s burial arrangements. From a legal perspective, the immediate question of authority reached its conclusion. The courts had answered the question placed before them. Yet they had not answered every question the dispute had come to represent.

The litigation ended.

The argument did not.

Supporters of the government’s position continued to believe that the public interest had been overlooked. Supporters of the family regarded the judgment as a necessary recognition of dignity and personal autonomy. Others questioned whether a foreign court should determine a matter involving a former Zambian president, even while accepting that the South African court had proper jurisdiction over the dispute. None of these disagreements disappeared because a judgment had been delivered. Nor could they. The courts had resolved a legal disagreement concerning authority. They had not resolved a social disagreement concerning meaning. I think this distinction matters far more than we often acknowledge. There is a tendency to assume that once a court has spoken, the dispute itself has been settled. That assumption reflects enormous confidence in legal institutions, and rightly so.  But legal resolution and social resolution are not the same thing. A judgment can settle the legal position while leaving history, politics, and public memory to continue their own conversation. Recognising this does not diminish the rule of law. It clarifies its purpose.

The law is exceptionally good at answering questions about authority. It is far less capable of answering questions about meaning. This became particularly apparent through the involvement of the South African courts. From a legal perspective, the Supreme Court of Appeal was not acting as a constitutional court for Zambia. It was exercising jurisdiction over a matter properly before a South African court. The judgment neither displaced Zambian constitutional law nor established precedent binding upon Zambian courts. Legally, that position is relatively straightforward. Socially and politically, however, the picture is much more complicated. The consequences of the judgment extended well beyond the courtroom. Its decision determined the practical outcome of a dispute involving a former Zambian president. It shaped public discussion within Zambia, influenced competing political narratives, and inevitably became part of the constitutional history of both jurisdictions. This is why I find it difficult to accept the comforting image of courts existing outside the societies they serve. Judges do not operate in a vacuum. That observation should not be mistaken for criticism.

Quite the opposite.

Judicial independence does not require judges to ignore the consequences of their decisions. Such a standard would be impossible. Every important constitutional judgment shapes institutions, public confidence, political behaviour, and historical memory. What judicial independence requires is something much more demanding: that judges continue to decide according to law despite those consequences. The South African judges undoubtedly understood that their decision would resonate far beyond South Africa’s borders. The Zambian government understood it. The family understood it. The public understood it. Acknowledging that reality does not undermine the legitimacy of the judgment. It simply recognises that law is practised within society rather than above it. Perhaps this is where socio-legal thinking becomes most valuable. Traditional legal analysis asks whether a judgment is legally correct.

Socio-legal analysis asks a different question. 

What does the judgment do?

How does it shape political memory?

Whose understanding of history does it reinforce?

What conversations does it close?

Which ones does it begin?

These questions do not compete with legal analysis. They complete it. The Edgar Lungu dispute illustrates that constitutional judgments do more than resolve disputes between parties. They become part of the stories nations tell about themselves. Every significant judgment leaves behind more than legal precedent. It leaves behind an interpretation of events that future generations inherit, question, and reinterpret. History, after all, is not merely a collection of facts. It is a collection of narratives about what those facts have come to mean.

Literature has understood this problem long before lawyers attempted to describe it. The most enduring novels rarely ask readers to arrive at a single interpretation of a character. Instead, they invite competing readings that evolve across generations. Characters are remembered differently because readers bring different histories, values, and experiences to the same text. Political lives function in much the same way. Former presidents do not become fixed historical objects upon their death. They become narratives that are continually revisited, challenged, and reinterpreted. Law inevitably becomes one voice within that conversation, but it can never become the only one. Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo has been understood as a tragic hero, a victim of colonialism, and an architect of his own downfall. The character does not change, the interpretation of him does. Achebe understood that a life can remain fixed while it’s meaning continually changes.Political figures are remembered in remarkably similar ways. Their lives remain fixed, but the stories societies tell about those lives continue to evolve. Former presidents do not become fixed historical objects upon their death. They become subjects of continual interpretation. Families remember one life. Governments may remember another. Political supporters, opponents, historians, journalists, and future generations all construct narratives that coexist, compete, and evolve over time.

Perhaps that is why the Edgar Lungu dispute has remained so compelling. It began as a disagreement about burial. It became a disagreement about identity. It evolved into a disagreement about public interest, constitutional authority, political memory, and the stories a nation tells about itself. The courts could determine who possessed the legal authority to decide.

They could not determine which story of Edgar Lungu would ultimately endure. Nor should we expect them to. Some questions belong to courts. Others belong to historians. Others remain within families. Many continue in public debate. And some are carried, quietly, through literature, where societies often wrestle with questions that law alone cannot answer.

The rule of law remains one of the greatest achievements of constitutional democracy because it tells us who has the authority to decide. The meaning of a life, however, will always be written collectively. Not by a single judgment. But by the continuing conversation between law, history, politics, literature, and society. The Edgar Lungu dispute reminds us that some legal disputes are difficult not because the law is unclear, but because the law is being asked to answer questions that ultimately belong to history, memory, and human interpretation.