readings on cry the beloved country alan paton

High levels of unemployment and the absence of any family structure mean that crime is endemic, and Stephen is shocked to find that his son Absalom, not much more than a boy, has shot and killed a white man and is on trial for his life in a society fearful of black violence. There are few options for women in this distorted economy: either the humiliations of domestic service, or the better-paid but degrading option of prostitution or selling illegal booze. Here the haves and have-nots are separated by skin colour, and the divide is signalled in countless ways, in ways we might know about such as the segregation of trains and townships, but also in ways we might not, such as when a handshake ‘in the custom of the Europeans’ displaces customary tribal ways of greeting.Įuropean farming has disrupted the village economy and despoiled the environment, and displacement of the rural population into the mines is the consequence. Using pitiful savings scraped together over many years, Stephen travels from the village of Ndotsheni, in Natal to find out what has become of them.Īuthors – from Tolstoy to Balzac to Dickens – have explored the corrupting influence of city life on the impressionable young, but Paton’s Johannesburg is corrupted by something bigger and more evil than glitter. Like Stephen’s sister Gertrude Kumalo, Absalom went to the city for work and lost contact with his family. The plot revolves around the spiritual journey of the pastor Stephen Kumalo whose son Absalom Kumalo has been corrupted by life in Johannesburg.

Reading it today when South Africa is a multiracial democracy, I notice different aspects of the novel. I read Cry, the Beloved Country through the prism of these events and felt that everything was hopeless.

If anything, the situation in South Africa in the 1970s was even worse than when the book was first published in 1948 because there had been the Sharpeville massacre, Nelson Mandela was behind bars on Robben Island and the activist Ruth First had been killed by the South African security forces.

I first read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country decades ago, when apartheid was still firmly entrenched and the idea of multiracial democracy seemed like an impossible dream. Listening to an audio book is a good way to revisit a book read a long time ago.

Readings on cry the beloved country alan paton