#ReadAroundTheWorld. #South Africa

This story was written in 1946 by White South African author Alan Paton, and published in 1948 on the eve of the creation Apartheid in South Africa. It is a classic work of protest literature, focussing on the evils of racism, exploitation and colonialism. Paton later started the Liberal Party in South Africa which opposed apartheid. This book was first published in the US as it was unlikely to be published in South Africa at the time.

The story takes us to the village of Ndotsheni in Natal, where Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu minister, is called to go to Johannesburg to see his sister who is ill. Sadly he finds she has become involved in selling liquor and prostitution. He then seeks to find his son Absalom who he eventually discovers in jail having shot and killed a white man. Despite the heartbreak Kumalo must find a way to go on, to fight for the plight of his people and his village.

The book moves between the gentle conversations of Kumalo and some paragraphs questioning where South Africa is headed and the tyranny of the oppression of black people in mines, in the villages and the squatter camps of the metropolis.

This was a moving story, well-written and impacting. The tone is mildly patronising at points, which doesn’t surprise me given it was written nearly eighty years ago, but Paton takes on the important role of becoming a whistleblower on an international level, revealing what was going on in South Africa. You can sense his passion for the country and the vehemence of his beliefs about the evils of racial segregation and exploitation. This is an important work cutting to the heart of a great tragedy. ( )

Serious "white guy writing about black people" vibes here, but undeniably powerful. Also useful as a picture of a place and time. ( )

Another historical fiction that was probably just contemporary fiction at the time (published 1947, and I think the year is mentioned as 1946 at some point in the novel?), and my second book extra credit for Feb/March for Biere Library book club! I actually never read this in high school, so this was my first time through and I can see why: goes over a historical period, compelling conflicting points of view, and some lyrical writing. Also, another accidental foray into another piece of media thinking about fatherhood as Stephen Kumalo and Jarvis consider the incident between their sons.

I did audiobook due to infant wrangling in this season, and while I really did like Michael York's narration, the Zulu and Afrikaans words really should be read (physical editions also have glossaries, I'm told) as I spent the first third thinking Kumalo's home village was "Indochine" and wondered at the global nature of place names. ( )

This book was so moving and beautifully written. Don't miss it. ( )

Beautiful. Also relevant. There are things about 1948 South Africa that ring true here, today. So much fear. This is a sad book, for sure, but also lovely. ( )

What an amazing book. This had been on my list to read for a long time and I wish I had gotten to it sooner. The writing is amazing, the first few pages grabbed me and I felt the amazing rhythm of the words that reminded me of South African songs I know. The difficult plot is handled so sensitively. I am so glad I read this and it will stay with me a long time.

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Published in 1948 about South Africa. It also provided insights on Abraham Lincoln; his writing and speeches. MGA can remember ploughing through Barlett's afterward. Wonderful, should re-read." ( )

Cry, the Beloved Country is a 1948 novel by Alan Paton. Set in the prelude to apartheid in South Africa, it follows a black village priest and a white farmer who must deal with news of a murder.

This is the story of South Africa, and it is the story of two fathers and two sons. There is a moment in which the fathers meet face-to-face that contains everything there is of humanity and the struggle for understanding and compassion in men. That moment left me eviscerated.

I love that this is not written in the spirit of good vs. evil, but in the spirit of man vs. his baser instincts. I sincerely loved Stephen Kumalo and Mr. Jarvis, and I felt both their heartaches. Some books are meant to be written, they well up from inside an author and spill onto the page because their message is one that must be voiced, and this is such a book.

The history of South Africa is sad and, like all colonializations, it is complicated. There is a way of life destroyed and no attempt to offer a replacement that is viable for the native population.

It suited the white man to break the tribe, he continued gravely. But it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken.

In the midst of this chaos and struggle, Paton finds the wisdoms that make humans reflections of God. Msimangu says But there is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power. The more I contemplated that statement, the more profound it seemed to me.

Much of what afflicts the people of South Africa at the time of this book’s publication has been remedied, but its message is so strong and so important and so universal that it can easily be applied to much of what we continue to see in the world today. And, at a more personal level, there are the feelings of the men involved that are so true to feelings each of us have or may have.

This was almost the last thing that his son had done. When this was done he had been alive. Then at this moment, at this very word that hung in the air, he had got up and gone down the stairs to his death. If one could have cried then, don’t go down! If one could have cried, stop, there is danger! But there was no one to cry. No one knew then what so many knew now.

Are these not the thoughts that run through our minds at the moment of loss? Why didn’t I do this or that? Why wasn’t I watching closer? Why didn’t I speak up, hold on, stop fate by altering the time frame by one precious second?

I understand that this novel is now included in many high school curricula, and I applaud that. Everyone should read it.

( )

I guess I missed this book in high-school. I watched the movie and was flummoxed by the ending but the book cleared it up. A very good book, lyrical writing, highly recommend. ( )

This is an excellent book. ( )

Beautiful. A piece of poetry, and mercy, and secrets, and wonderment. ( )

David Powlison recommends this book as one that all pastors should read. It began slowly, but picked up the pace and pulled me in as the plot began to develop. Life is messy and demands responses that sometimes test the character and fortitude of a man. Sorrows and affliction abound in the life of the protagonist, a Zulu priest living during the time period that prefigured apartheid South Africa. Native crime and the breakdown of the land and tribal system are a pair of major themes. ( )

No wonder this is one of Tun Dr Mahathir’s favourite book! It’s written beautifully with much thought and feels into it! So relatable and I can understand the anguish parent’s thoughts.

Here's my full review:
http://www.sholee.net/2019/10/mpov-cry-beloved-country.html ( )

For a book that was written over 60 years ago, it is remarkable how much its speaks to the soul of South Africa. The broken lives of both black and white people and how the only redemption is through forgiveness, and working together.

It is a simple story of an old pastor who travels from rural Kwazulu-Natal, to find his son. The place he comes from is impoverished and broken, the land is abused by primitive farming and agriculture and families are broken. It is a land of old men and children because the young leave to work in the cities, serving the industry of white men.

Kumalo ultimately arrives too late, because he cannot save his son from the evils of the big city. It is the tragedy of many Africans who leave their homeland never to return, they are swallowed by the city and its ills, the crime, the booze, and the loose living. Those who survive these ills are lost in a struggle for power or in politics, and stray one way or another. In either way there is no return.

Alan Paton speaks with compassion about the problems of South Africa and points to a solution, that is valid even now. Love the land, work for the land. The idea of redemption is strongly linked in the story with the Christian faith, but it also had a strong element of respecting the wisdom of the land, and believing in the kindness and humanity of other. The human story remains as poignant and fresh today as if Alan Paton has just written it. No wonder that this book is one of the greatest pieces of African writing.

It contains very pointed insight. I was struck especially by the depiction of the traditional African chief. Paton describes through his protagonist, how the white man broke down the traditional tribe, and knocked the chiefs down, then restored them to be rulers over swathes of broken and used up land. It is a sad reality that is perhaps valid all over the world. The puppets are never as good as the real chiefs that would have been born from the wisdom of the land and the people. Excellent book should be read by everyone, especially those connected to Africa and South Africa. ( )

Set in S Africa apartheid poverty anguish and beauty of human spirit in spite of adversity

This book is a modern classic. There is no other way you can describe the book.
Alan Paton's writing is deceptively simple. It rolls gently along, telling the tale of the good Father, Stephen Kumalo, as he travels to Johannesburg to get his son. No spoilers!

It's a beautiful gentle tale, and while you read about Father Kumalo you also read about South Africa.

There is no plot, no dramatic ending, just the rolling of the tide. It's beautiful, poignant, with piercing insight.

Read it. It is relevant to us humans today. ( )

A tragic but excellent story of fear, murder, faith and love. ( )

I listened to this book, read my Michael York. It likely would have been better if read by a South African, who could have done the various accents better. The story is powerful and enjoyable for many reasons. But, I will likely never read this book again, and instead watch the movie starring James Earl Jones, which is absolutely wonderful. ( )

Patton paints of picture of South Africa in the late 40s that is balanced and I think more powerful because he lets the details and events speak for themselves. His writing style is clean, sparse. There are no unnecessary literary flourishes or intrusions. It’s a heartbreaking, honest story which has not lost its relevance. ( )

Amazing read. Interesting insight into the South Africa right at the cusp of entering into the age of Apartheid. Capturing the complicated state of people and cultures clashing in an era of rapid change. Beautifully written. ( )

A beautiful, deeply sad book that tells the story of South Africa before Apartheid had a name, but when most of that system was functionally in place, through a few peoples' connected stories.

The writing is a powerful example of how to love a place while despising crucial things about it.

The book does have some weaknesses which I think reflect the author's position of privilege relative to half of the characters. White saviourism creeps in a little in book 3; there aren't really any fully realised female characters; and I think he lets off Anglo South Africa too easily by caricaturing Afrikaners as the sole drivers of Apartheid. It's a mark of Paton's skill as a writer that all of these elements are much less of a drag than in other books like this I've read (notably Snow Falling on Cedars, which is all-but-ruined by the equivalent flaws). It may be the best account a white South African could have written of that moment in time, and now I really want to read a black South African's counterpart. ( )

This is the big daddy of all liberal South African protest novels, the first really high-profile international bestseller to draw attention to the damage done by the racism embedded in the South African system, even before the fiction of "apartheid" was created.

It's a simple, very classically-constructed novel, a tragedy built around a father's quest for his missing son, full of symbolic landscape description and stately, formal conversations, peppered with interpolated sociological observations that come at us from a Marxist-Anglican viewpoint, all of it very much more 1848 than 1948. But somehow that doesn't seem to matter: Paton gets away with it because of his obvious love for the country and the people who live in it and his passionate concern to undo the mess that it is in.

Paton sees the racism that poisons South African life in a straightforward Marxist way, as an ideology that has grown up to justify the need the capitalist system has to keep black people in poverty so that there will always be a pool of unskilled labour prepared to work at low wages to keep the mines and farms going. By taking away the best land and forcing people into inadequate "reserves", the old agricultural economy of the tribal system has been broken down, taking with it the social control and restraints on behaviour of traditional society. Young men have to leave their families to go and work in the cities — the system doesn't allow them to establish stable family homes in the cities, or to build careers or businesses once they are there, so those who are too enterprising or too undisciplined to cope with tedious work in mines and factories are more than likely to end up in crime.

For the moment, political opposition doesn't seem to offer a way out — in the absence of any real political responsibilities open to them, black leaders are vulnerable to being corrupted by the system. Well-meaning white liberals can make a difference on a small local scale, but in the end they are only giving back a part of what their community took away in the first place. The only real pillar of hope for Paton seems to be the (Anglican-) Christian church, which gives black people a new kind of community structure to replace what they have lost in the breakdown of tribal bonds. But he's clearly not expecting the revolution any time soon.

If this were a new book, it would be criticised because Paton is a white person writing from the point of view of a black protagonist, using elements of style that are clearly meant to give the book an African rhythm, but which can sometimes start looking rather Hiawatha-ish: Here is a white man's wonder, a train that has no engine, only an iron cage on its head, taking power from metal ropes stretched out above. Conversations that are supposed to be in Zulu are rendered in very formal, courteous English, which is perhaps an accurate representation of the way social relations in Zulu work, but starts after a while to look like a cliché of old-fashioned exoticising colonial fiction. It's clearly all well-meant, of course, and in the context of its time, we can't really use the "cultural appropriation" argument that Paton is stealing space in which black writers could have been selling their books. If anything, he's helping to create a demand for more African writing.

Of course, Paton wrote this for an international audience, during a stay abroad, and the book must owe a lot of its success to the self-satisfaction American readers got from discovering that there were worse things in the world than their own home-grown racism, and British readers from finding that it wasn't their responsibility any more. The South African authorities, of course, banned it. But Paton did go back home and continued to engage in South African politics, doing his best to swim against the tide and work for change.

Whatever you think of it, it's an engaging tear-jerker and an important document of its time. ( )

The story of a country parson's journey to Johannesburg to find his son is told in the slow, stately rhythms of country life, and perhaps the Zulu language itself. I was moved by the ritual use of language: go well, stay well, yes, I understand, many other repeated phrases that become something of a hymn to the country and the lost culture. The characters are sometimes emblems: the girl, the demonstrator, the boy, the child, all without names. But the characters that are named are very present. The parson's brother John has long since relocated to Johannesburg, and adopted city ways and pace. Gertrude has been totally corrupted by the city after traveling there to find her husband. Jarvis and Parson Kumalo share the countryside and the terrible pain of loss. Msimangu is a loving guide through the inferno of the city, and a truly religious man.

Paton doesn't shy away from the politics and desolation of apartheid, but he shows its effect on behavior, on the way things must be done and must not be done. He makes it very personal, and all his characters sympathetic, no easy task.
And the book is filled with grinding poverty, unspoken fears, poignant hope.

We know now that apartheid has ended, reconcilliation has been attempted, people still live in poverty and separation. Amazingly, there was no war. But the fears between and among groups of different people resurge, and this book bears reading again.

"But there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power."

Stephen Kumalo is a Zulu and a Anglican priest living in a small farming community set aside for the natives. One day he and his wife receive a letter from Johannesburg, urging him to come visit the city because his sister Gertrude needs help. Many people from his tribe have gone to the city and never returned, including his own son, so Stephen sets off to try and find them.

The city is a bewildering place for simple tribal priest and Stephen is soon taken advantage of but he is befriended by the Reverend Msimangu, the man who sent the letter to him, who helps Stephen find his way around and locate missing family members. He first finds his sister Gertrude who has fallen to alcohol and prostitution. She has a child who is unkempt and neglected. He takes them both to his boarding house, intent on bringing them both back home to the village. He also finds his brother who has been rallying the natives to fight back against exploitation of the miners and unfair wages. His words are dangerous and he is seen as a threat by the whites.

But Stephen is most anxious to find his son and with help from Msimangu follow the trail from one lead to another. Along the way Stephen learns that his son got a young girl pregnant and spent time incarcerated in a rehabilitation program, only to be released and disappear again.

When a white man is murdered by a native Stephen fears the worst, that his son may be the perpetrator, because not only is Arthur Jarvis a white man, but is also an outspoken political activist against apartheid and the son of James Jarvis, his neighbour and landowner near his home village. Days later, his son Absalom, when he is approached by the police confesses to being the murderer.

The murder forces both fathers are forced to reflect on their own lives. Stephen initially loses his faith, but regains it through the kindness of others whilst James, despite having lost his son to black crime, begins to study what his son had written about it and begins to see things in a different light, even developing a relationship, albeit a distant one, with his son’s killer's father and his black neighbours.

“Sorrow is better than fear,"............ "Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.”

I am a big fan of reading books about history, in particular social history and even more so if it is about post-colonialism. So a book on South Africa and/or apartheid is right up my street even if it can be at times uncomfortable reading for a white male. Although this book was written before the end of apartheid and as such is thankfully a little dated now, I still found it an incredibly emotional read offering as it does, a small glimpse into a terrible injustice that I can only imagine.

Alan Paton is a white South African and when the book was published it was an enormous success around the world but banned in the author's home country afraid that it might challenge the status quo! This is a book packed full of Christian themes such as faith, forgiveness and atonement but also looks at how western civilization's encroachment on the native Zulu tribes and families has been severely detrimental to them. With only roughly 10% of the land being given over to the native population there is not enough land to feed their own families and in particular with not enough land to safely rear and feed their cattle, a status symbol to the tribesmen, the land that they have got has become over-grazed and is dying meaning that many of the young men and women are forced to leave their ancestral lands in search of work and money in the cities and mines leaving only the old, the very young and the infirm behind them. Once away from their tribal elders these young men and women find it hard to resist temptation and follow a righteous path. They are taken advantage of, paid slave wages and so the crime rate soars. Although Johannesburg was rife with racism and apartheid, it was heart-warming to see acts kindness between people, both black and white. In a book filled with so much pain examples of occasional kindness was welcome.

"I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they have turned to loving, they will find that they are turned to hating."

I found this a very powerful at at times moving read but there were also a few elements about the writing that made me a little uncomfortable even a little offensive in out hopefully more enlightened times. Especially because the author is white. Too often the natives are depicted as very simple people, with simple minds, and even described as “children” completely incompatible with western civilization, big cities, and temptation. But perhaps worst of all there seems to be a suggestion, probably unintended, that God was in fact white. These are only minor quibbles and any future reader must recognise the society into which this book was published but in today's world they are enough to stop me from rewarding this otherwise gripping book top marks. Sorry ( )