Book title: Cry the beloved country
Author: Alan Paton
Vintage Publishers (London)
Alan Paton’s book, appropriately titled Cry the Beloved Country, was the international mobilizer of popular consciousness of South Africa’s perverse politics. The book was set in South Africa, but written in Trondheim, Norway and finished in San Francisco (United States).
Paton, a white liberal, tells the story of a father who goes to the city of Johannesburg in search of his delinquent son. His search takes him through a network of murder, prostitution, racial hatred, poverty, crime, hopelessness, neglect, and ultimately redemption.
We learn to understand the problem of race relations in South Africa and its impact on people’s lives through Reverend Kumalo’s journey. You receive a letter from a mission house in Johannesburg. The letter informs Reverend Kumalo that his sister was very ill. In reality, Reverend Kumalo’s sister’s illness is an allegory for South Africa during the dark days of apartheid (1948 to 1994).
Upon arrival in Johannesburg, Reverend Kumalo is mugged at the busy Jozi station, a baptism of fire but, in retrospect, the tip of the iceberg. On a journey to save his sister, Reverend Kumalo runs into bigger social and family problems. His brother has become a respected anti-apartheid activist and has denounced the Church. His son Absalom has just been released from a correctional facility and later murders a white man who worked closely with anti-apartheid activists trying to find a permanent solution to the problem of indigenous crime. While at the same time his sister had become a prostitute and a shebeen queen. Nerve wrenching. Perhaps fascinating things for moviegoers. Reverend Kumalo’s son was hanged for murder, his sister disappeared the night she was supposed to go with him to start a new life in the village.
However, the tragedy is that Cry the Beloved Country resembled the reality of life in apartheid South Africa. These were not the imaginations of an overly jealous writer.
Cry the Beloved Country is a deeply harrowing book. This is compounded by Paton’s tacit approval of the death penalty that allows the judge to send a young man to the gallows with flimsy evidence. However, Paton is still the only writer to me who knew the important principle: if you mess up, you must clean up. The book urges whites to play a bigger role in rebuilding South Africa because they benefited from apartheid or allowed fear to dominate their lives.
Paton’s powerful manuscript is a must read for everyone, even today. In one paragraph he captures what is perhaps the greatest obstacle to true reconciliation: “I have a great fear in my heart, that one day when they (the whites) become loving, they will discover that we turn into hate.”