The burden of the past is not an unmixed curse – a viable future requires that some aspects be preserved while others are challenged and replaced.

Douglass North's notion of ‘path dependence’, loosely understood as the idea that patterns of the past survive stubbornly into the future, is gaining ground as a means of explaining post-apartheid South Africa. And so it should – two decades into democracy, the continuities are evident. In all aspects of public life except formal politics, the hierarchies which existed before 1994 remain intact: the elite has absorbed new black entrants but the power relationships in the economy and society endure. Equally important is that the elite follows much the same rules and adheres to many of the norms which prevailed before democracy. The cultural assumptions which underpinned minority domination remain as visible as they were at democracy's inception. It is becoming clearer that what has happened over the past two decades is not a ‘negotiated revolution’ but, in the main, the absorption of a section of the black majority into the structures and institutions which once served a minority.

But if this accounts for the survival of much that constrains the society and subordinates many of its citizens, path dependence has another face, for it also explains the strength of some important democratic features of post-1994 South Africa: the endurance of electoral democracy and continued commitment to the rule of law. Less obviously perhaps, the labour relations regime which enables trade unions to bargain on behalf of their members, sometimes hailed as one of the achievements of the new democracy is, in reality, a modified version of a system introduced (for racial minorities only) in 1924. And so ‘path dependence’ in South Africa presents a Janus face – it is friend and foe of an inclusive, egalitarian democracy, a reminder of that which needs to be preserved as well as that which needs to change.

THE CONTOURS OF PATH DEPENDENCE

As important as ‘path dependence’ is as an explanation of contemporary realities, it is important to distinguish clearly between what it is and what it is not – far more is at stake than the reality that aspects of the past survive into the present.