In 1854, John Colenso, the newly appointed Bishop of Natal, arrived in the colony on a preliminary tour. After meeting many of the settler families and colonial administrators, Colenso looked forward to meeting indigenous Africans, with whom he hoped to build productive and close, lasting relationships. During one of his first encounters with a Natal African, however, Colenso (1855: 45) remembered that settler administrators (even those ostensibly self-designated as ‘philo-Kafirs’ or liberal-minded on racial divisions) had instructed him on the parameters of colonial friendship with indigenous peoples. He recalled:

At such an early point in the colony's history, the limits of sociability and friendship had already become clear in the minds of settler administrators. The logics of colonial rule in Natal required an effective division between the ‘African’ subject and the ‘proper’ settler; these divisions were to be further entrenched politically and legally through the implementation of customary law for Africans and civil law for European colonists. This moment of unrealized friendship provides a profound and intriguing site of rupture in the colonial record. From Colenso's intimation of the perspective of Mr. Shepstone, and the other ‘philo-Kafirs’, we can presume that the hierarchized distinctions between African and European were to be understood as a paternalistic form of love. Yet Colenso's shake was not a paternalistic or hierarchal form of ‘love’ for the African; rather, he imagined his gesture as a magnanimous, or brotherly act of friendship.