For some commentators, post-1994 corruption in South Africa confirms one of the truisms of politics: African states are always corrupt.

The belief that majority rule in Africa always collapses into corruption as the governing elite turns the state into its property is deeply embedded in journalistic understandings of the continent. This view began influencing coverage of South Africa almost immediately after democracy's advent. It also shapes much scholarship on Africa – ‘neopatrimonialism’, the term used by scholars to describe corrupt governance, has spawned a very active school of academic writing which influences African scholars as well as those in the West. This is so despite the fact that the term fails to explain anything and is more a prejudice about post-colonial Africa than a means of analysing it. This way of thinking about post-apartheid South Africa underpins the view that this country negotiated a new order which closed the book on a troubled past and opened the way for harmony and prosperity until politicians, driven by greed, used public office to enrich themselves and so to ensure that South Africa went the way of all African countries.

This view implies, of course, that corruption and ‘state capture’ are new, a product of the moral failings of politicians thrown up by democracy in Africa. This misunderstands the dynamics of which the Zuma period was a product because it fails to see this malfeasance as a symptom of the survival of the past. Path dependence alone did not cause corruption. But corruption continues a South African pattern which is centuries old; path dependence has made it more likely and probably more of a problem than it would have been if a different path had been followed.

A TRADITIONAL WAY OF LIFE?

Corruption – the ‘unsanctioned or unscheduled use of public resources for private ends’ – in South Africa dates back to the beginning of white settlement in the midseventeenth century.

Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch East India Company official who began white settlement, was sent to the Cape to redeem himself after he was found to have engaged in ‘private trading’ in a previous posting. There is no evidence that he resumed his self-enrichment scheme at the Cape. But this early phase of colonial rule was marked by significant corruption.