Cry, the Beloved Country

I studied this great work of literature in the 1960s in Secondary School in Mombasa and the injustice of humanity in this tragic story is still indelibly etched in my heart. The story is set in Ndotsheni, a poor, agricultural village in South Africa but with a strong sense of community and in the city of Johannesburg a corrupt, big city where it's every man for himself. It is about a Zulu pastor, Stephen Kumalo, who receives a letter that his sister in Johannesburg has fallen sick. Kumalo undertakes the difficult journey travelling from his village to the city in… show more.

This great novel is set at the beginning of formal apartheid in South Africa (the apartheid government was elected four months after its publication in 1948). Paton is credited with successfully crafting a convincing Black character, Stephen Kumalo, a rural priest whose son murdered a white man known for his advocacy of racial justice. Paton’s novel is a remarkably prescient account of the racial tensions that were to accelerate in apartheid South Africa. His work is personal to me mainly because he was an important opponent of the apartheid regime and one of the founders of the Liberal Party of… show more.

I wrote my first novel thirty years after I left South Africa. During the writing, I reread Cry, the Beloved Country. The tone of that book, the cadences of the language, almost biblical, as well as the emotional seriousness in the telling, crept into my own style.

This is a heartbreaking book, told from a very personal perspective, yet universal in its themes.

Can a work of art change the world? Perhaps not on the grand political stage, but most certainly it can change the way we see the world, and thus change us for the better.

This book is protest literature that highlights the unjust social and political structures in our world, as had existed in apartheid South Africa. It reminds us of the existing dangers so long as such structures remain. And it is also a warning that much as there are punishments for crimes committed by the individual, as in the case of Absalom Kumalo, there also are unpleasant consequences for failure of leadership.