A protest by a white South African writer against the repressive policy of apartheid in his native country, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic of the literature of racial injustice. A third-person omniscient narrator relates the story of the Rev. Stephen Kumalo as he travels from an agrarian village environment into the urban jungle of Johannesburg in search of his son, Absalom, and his sister, Gertrude; he hopes his brother John, a successful merchant, can assist him.

Paton uses the land itself as a key thematic symbol in his poetic descriptions of South Africa: in remote places untouched by colonialism, the land remains verdant and fertile; however, where European settlement has affected traditional African ways, the land is desiccated and fails to support its inhabitants. Green hills give way to raw, red valleys, which in turn lead to the sterile pavements of white cities. Stephen Kumalo is summoned to traverse this pathway from the living world of his home village to the deadly world of the city. His mission is to redeem the missing members of his family, and the obstacles to his success are numerous and powerful.

In making his protagonist a Zulu Christian minister, Paton incorporates two conflicting results of colonialism at the heart of his story: European religion—Christianity—has provided a highly idealistic model for the organization of African spiritual and ethical life, but European economics—capitalism—has worked in the opposite direction, devastating the land and destroying the lives of many Africans. The growth of cities and the spread of wage employment in mines and factories have worked together to draw young men and women away from their villages and from the support system of extended families into fragile dependencies on jobs and their own individual resources. When jobs end, or when personal strength fails, these transplanted Africans frequently become even more victimized, with their own weaknesses amplifying the oppressions of apartheid.

Thus Gertrude has sunk to prostitution and black-market dealing in liquor, and Absalom has turned to drunkenness and crime. When Stephen Kumalo finds Absalom, the young man is in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Arthur Jarvis. Ironically, Arthur Jarvis had been a white idealist working to improve the lot of Africans. Two other boys, including the son of Stephen’s brother, John, were also accused. Tragically, John uses his influence to help his own son at the expense of Absalom, who alone is sentenced to death for the crime.

Stephen Kumalo cannot help his son survive, but he does meet the young woman carrying Absalom’s child. He arranges for the couple to be married; Absalom cannot save himself from the hangman, but he does the right thing in giving his own child a family name and a place of refuge with his father. Stephen returns to his village not with Gertrude and Absalom but with the children of these two. Paton suggests that a generation has been lost, but that hope may still flourish in the villages.

Stephen’s village, starving after the crops have failed, receives help from an unexpected source when Arthur Jarvis’s father decides to carry on his son’s benevolent work. In the greatest irony of the book, two fathers of different races, both bereft of their sons, work together to make the world a better place in memory of the sons they have lost.

Paton creates a story that is sympathetic to the suffering of the native population oppressed by apartheid, but he also expands the plot to encompass white suffering as well—white suffering that has as its root the policy of apartheid and its effects on the native peoples of the land. Implicitly, South Africa can flourish again only when all of its occupants are working together for their mutual benefit.

Bibliography

Brutus, Dennis. “Protest Against Apartheid.” In Protest and Conflict in African Literature. Edited by Cosmo Pieterse and Donald Munro. New York: Africana, 1969.

Callan, Edward. Cry, the Beloved Country: A Novel of South Africa. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies, 69. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Paton, Jonathan. “Comfort in Desolation.” In International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. Edited by Robert L. Ross. New York: Garland, 1991.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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