It is a common assumption that Africa's democratic and developmental experiences hold very few lessons for the rest of the world. For example, Anthony Butler, in the introduction to the second edition of his book, Contemporary South Africa, suggests that ‘African democratization … generated no fundamental theoretical innovations’. He argues that southern European and Latin American experiences in the 1970s and 1980s, on the other hand, have challenged determinist assumptions of democratisation, ‘emphasizing the role of human agency and historical contingency’, whereas eastern and central European transitions created ‘contagion effects and external precipitation in Moscow, [and] resulted in further productive intellectual reconfiguration’ (Butler, 2009: 156).

Of course, this conclusion is controversial, particularly as it is supported by so little evidence. For instance, while Butler discusses Mahmood Mamdani's (1996) work on bifurcated forms of political rule in the urban and rural, he does not seem to take into consideration the theoretical challenges that the Ugandan scholar's study poses for theories of democratic transition, and especially for notions of governance and conceptions of citizenry. Similarly, Butler does not reference or engage with Bratton and Van de Walle's (1994; 1997) comparative studies on African democratisation, whose notion of neo-patrimonial regimes, even though I am not partial to it, nevertheless forces traditional democratisation theory to grapple with how underlying structures and prior regime types condition the subsequent evolution of democratisation and its outcomes.

Butler's conclusion does an even bigger disservice to South Africa's democratisation process, which was the focus of his study. To take but one example, South Africa's transition was founded on the dual principles of reconciliation and justice. This manifested in the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which itself has generated much scholarship (see, for example, Boraine, 2000; James and Van de Vijver, 2001; Tutu, 1999; Villa- Vicencio and Verwoerd, 2000). In addition, South Africa's broader reconciliation agenda allowed scholars such as Mamdani (2009a) to posit the notion of survivor's justice as an alternative to the type of victor's justice symbolised in the Nuremburg trials that took place after the Second World War.