The realities which face a path-dependent South Africa were, in the view of many scholars, identified in a book written in the mid-1990s by a celebrated Ugandan-born academic: Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject. While the book discussed post-colonial African states in general, it devoted much attention to South Africa in particular (its author was based at the University of Cape Town during the early years of democracy).

The book seems to describe contemporary South Africa in uncanny detail. It insists that the present is shaped by the past. It argues that essential to the continuity between past and present is a society in which some enjoy much fuller citizenship than others; that many are excluded from the ‘civil society’ in which citizens use their rights to make the government hear their voice and so from the national debate; and that the divide between urban and rural which was a core feature of colonisation was perpetuated by government after minority rule's end. These are all realities in South Africa today: the book's relevance to the issues facing the society is confirmed by daily news bulletins. But while this testifies to the importance of Mamdani's book, it does not mean that its argument for why all this came to be explains reality.

For Mamdani, realities under minority rule have survived its end in South Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, because the ‘bifurcated state’ built by colonialism, including apartheid, lives on. Mamdani argues that the colonial state (which very much includes South Africa's apartheid state) rested on a ‘dualism of power’, which was exercised very differently in the towns and rural areas. In urban areas, the colonial power ruled directly. In the countryside, it relied on ‘decentralised despotism’: it handed authority to ‘traditional leaders’ (who were not always entirely traditional since some were appointed by the colonising power) who ruled on the colonial state's behalf by imposing order on the leader's subjects, ensuring that they would not disturb minority rule.

In South Africa, this was a core feature of apartheid: black people were assigned citizenship in ‘ethnic homelands’ ruled by ‘traditional leaders’ chosen by the state, not because they were authentically traditional, but because they would cooperate in imposing order. At independence throughout Africa, rule was, Mamdani believes, deracialised, but ‘decentralised despotism’ stayed.