Historians agree that white paternalism towards blacks existed in South Africa, but generally view the implementation of paternalistic policies or actions in a negative light. I believe that negative perceptions about paternalism should be re-evaluated, and this chapter will analyse the interaction of buyers and owners with the Native Affairs Department (NAD) and the ways in which the Department staff's assistance to Africans made a difference to those involved.

Hermann Giliomee writes about an ‘ideology of paternalism’. His discussion begins with the master-slave relationship, when the emphasis was on caring for one's obedient slaves by providing them with food, shelter and protection. Giliomee continues by describing the apartheid leaders’ paternalism debate which emphasised trusteeship towards the majority African population with the goal of improving a ‘subordinate’ people. Kas Maine's experience, according to Charles van Onselen, presented a different picture, when Maine came to realise that white paternalism was ‘predicated on a structured inequality that required perpetual adolescence of the junior partner’. Still another side to the story of caring and protection emerged from NAD officials. In 1923, G. A. Godley, the Acting Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA), told an NAD field officer that the ‘primary function’ of the NAD was ‘to render such advice and assistance to Natives as lies in its power’. Howard Rogers, described by the SNA (in 1933) as ‘one of our able young men … and by experience exceptionally qualified’, wrote that the ‘paramount consideration is the promotion of the welfare’ of the Africans and every precaution, in the context of a discussion of leases, should be ‘taken to protect the interests of the Natives and to preclude interference with their rights’.

Selected officials and field officers talked about assisting and guiding ‘an undeveloped people’, and in the context of this book, trying to attain ‘reasonable and fair terms’ for prospective buyers and safeguarding owners’ rights. The Cape Chief Native Commissioner (CNC) wrote about the necessity for ‘sympathetic contact’ between magistrates and Africans.