Writing in 1896, Olive Schreiner, arguably the most radical critic of imperial policy of her day, argued that a racial apocalypse could be averted only if South Africa's white population ruled the country in the spirit of friendship, ‘a course of stern unremitting justice is demanded from us towards the native … we [must] raise him & bind him to ourselves with indissoluble bonds of sympathy and gratitude’. By tying the responsibilities of colonial governance to the cultivation of an unbreakable emotional bond, Schreiner articulated a vision of friendship that served as both an instrument and outcome of the civilizing mission, replacing a precarious rule of violence with the cultivation of a ‘native’ subjectivity that was bound by affection and gratitude to the (former) colonial master. Strikingly, a similar rhetoric can be found in the writing of white South Africans ranging from the segregationist Jan Smuts to the liberal author and politician Alan Paton, from apartheid ideologues of the 1950s to the young nonconformist Patrick Duncan. In the 1930s and 1940s, a social scientific version of this language developed under the sponsorship of the European-Native Joint Councils movement and the South African Institute of Race Relations. Whether articulated as a civilizing mission, separate development, or racial equality, each of these projects made claims on the emotional life of the colonized, and envisioned its outcome as generating bonds of affection between black and white. A history of colonial power in South Africa must therefore incorporate a genealogy of the language and practices of friendship.

At the same time, friendship is often understood to transcend the sphere of politics. Circulating affections and desires create connections that are not easily mapped onto existing power relations. Friendship can crystallize almost instantly both practices that resist structures of oppression and those that enable them: intimacies and complicities. This volume explores friendship as a mode of liberal colonial power, while still holding on to possibilities for insurgent, transgressive, and subversive friendships. How did the (generally homosocial) framework of colonial friendship function to police other forms of desire and articulate the gender dynamics of white settler society?