Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
A review.
By Razaq Khazi-Syed
This is another book that I read (and listened to) simultaneously. I really enjoyed hearing the African (Zulu and Xhosa) words and I especially enjoyed hearing those words pronounced in the correct manner.
The book by Alan Paton is set in 1940’s South Africa in the era leading up to Apartheid. It is a time of unprecedented racial strife in the country’s history. Alan Paton’s South Africa is starkly divided along color lines. The story revolves around two fathers (one white — Jarvis, the other black — Kumalo) and their respective sons.
The whites (of Afrikaner and English descent) live in large, well-built, leafy neighborhoods and the blacks and people of color are consigned to desperate villages, poor urban neighborhoods and shanty towns. Incidentally, I found out that in the South Africa of that time, the Afrikaners and the English largely lived in parallel worlds.
Alan Paton describes his beloved country vividly — rolling hills, soaring mountains, verdant highlands, and bare valleys (too many people are scratching out a living — so much so that the earth has no more to give — the blood red soil is drained of its vitality). The maize does not grow tall, the cattle are sickly, people are perpetually hungry, and many children don’t survive childhood.
He paints a similar picture when he describes the urban center of South Africa — Johannesburg, the dizzying and disorienting city of millions with its multitude of neighborhoods — from the whitest of white to the blackest of black.
The book starts with the receipt of a letter by Rev. Stephen Kumalo, an African Anglican pastor of Zulu descent in the rural hinterlands of the Natal province. The letter from a fellow priest, Rev. Msimangu in Johannesburg urgently summons Kumalo to the city to rescue his sister who has supposedly taken ill. Rev. Kumalo is the pastor of a humble church in Ndotsheni and his flock comprises the poor working class people of the area. Kumalo is a morally upright man, he has an abiding faith in God and he does not shirk his responsibilities.
Jarvis, in the meantime, lives on a lush farm in the verdant highlands above Ndotsheni. Jarvis’ world and Kumalo’s do not intersect, despite the fact that Jarvis’ farm is physically not very distant from Ndotsheni. The closest they come to each other is when Jarvis passes Kumalo’s modest church in Ndotsheni in his automobile on his way through the village.
Kumalo heads off to Johannesburg (a city he has never visited previously) with much trepidation, with his meager savings in hand. In the course of Kumalo’s discussions with his wife, we find out that their son, Absalom, left for Johannesburg a while ago and has not been heard from since. It is not uncommon to see young people leaving the countryside to find work in the big cities or in the country’s many gold mines. That seems to be just about the only way that black youth might escape crushing poverty and the general hopelessness of the countryside.
Paton’s book is a progressive voice in the moral darkness that was South Africa in the 1940s, but it does not manage to break away from the shackles of its time and place.
Kumalo and Msimangu are men of the cloth and are portrayed as simple dignified men. John Kumalo is Stephen’s brother — he has also settled in Johannesburg, and is something of a rabble rouser and a trade unionist. We also find that John has little use for Stephen’s church or the traditional Zulu way of life. He has left his longtime wife and taken up with someone else. The sense we get is that the native way of life has completely broken down. To our modern day sensibilities these might sound a bit stereotypical.
For someone more at home with Ndotsheni’s sedate pace, Kumalo finds Johannesburg highly disorienting — there are too many people and life moves too fast. But with the able assistance of the steadfast Msimangu, he locates his sister, who he is dismayed to find, has fallen into prostitution. She has a young son and she is barely able to take care of him. Kumalo is very upset with his sister, but eventually he relents and makes arrangements for her to accompany him back to Ndotsheni.
In the meantime, Kumalo and Msimangu start looking for Kumalo’s son Absalom. The closer they get to locating Absalom, the more fearful Kumalo becomes — he is in constant dread that something evil has befallen his son.
And tragically, that is exactly what has happened. Absalom’s life spirals out of control in Johannesburg — he falls in with shiftless company, spends time at a juvenile reformatory, strikes up a liaison with a young girl, and gets her pregnant. And worst of all, Absalom breaks into a house in an affluent white neighborhood and in a tragic turn of events kills the white home owner. The victim is none other than Jarvis’ son (the same Jarvis who owns the big farm above Kumalo’s Ndotsheni). The young Jarvis is a passionate advocate for the rights of South African blacks and people of color. He believes that exploitative methods once employed by whites when they were settling the continent were no longer justifiable in modern South Africa. He also thinks that whites have perverted Christianity to support the continued oppression of the majority black population of South Africa.
The rest of the book is about the trial of young Absalom, and the unraveling of the respective worlds of Kumalo and Jarvis. The lives of the fathers continue intersecting in interesting and unexpected ways. The older Kumalo had nothing to do with his son’s incomprehensible act of violence, and Jarvis rises above the prevailing prejudices of the day to recognize that fact. Absalom’s insistence that he did not mean to kill the younger Jarvis is believable, but will the country’s laws (created by whites for the benefit of whites) allow Absalom grace for a momentary lapse. An unforgivable lapse that results in the death of a white man by the hand of a black man?
Paton may have accurately portrayed life in 1940s South Africa, but there are some problematic themes (when examined with today’s perspectives). Blacks are acceptable to society (Kumalo and Msimangu are prime examples) if they don’t make waves — they adopt white-approved religion and culture, work within the system, and everything is good. Black women are allowed a very narrow range of acceptable behaviors (either very good or very bad) — the few such characters in the book are one dimensional.
There are many problematic white positions in South African society, but the key white characters in the book are mostly spotless — Jarvis’ son is a hybrid Christ-Lincoln figure cut down by the very people he is trying to help. Jarvis’ grandson shows early signs of promise — he is definitely going to do his deceased dad proud. And finally, the senior Jarvis himself rises above it all and takes an active interest in Ndotsheni. He works with Kumalo and the local villagers to build a dam, and hires someone to change destructive agricultural and animal husbandry methods to revive the desolated valley.
In spite of some of these issues that I saw in the book, I enjoyed the book thoroughly. It gave me insights into an area of the world that I did not know much about, and helped me to understand the conditions that eventually led to Apartheid. Paton’s ode to a country and a people he loves is very evident in the book. His rich portrayal of Kumalo reflects the human condition — innocence and the loss of innocence, hope and fear, expectation of society and society’s expectation, and resilience and endurance. And the conclusion of the book is absolute lyrical.
As Absalom’s judicial process winds its way towards its seemingly inevitable conclusion, Kumalo heads to the mountains to meditate, affirm his faith, and to commune with nature and his God. The evocative picture Paton paints of Kumalo as he heads up the mountain and his state of mind as the night progresses to the inevitable breaking of the dawn was breathtaking.
With these lovely words Paton ends the book: “Yes, it is the dawn that has come. The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”
