Alan Paton (1903–1988)

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 show more 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. show less

(review originally written for bookslut)

I couldn't possibly have made a better choice to follow Things Fall Apart with than Cry, The Beloved Country. Of course, I didn't know that at the time. I did know that both books were written by Africans, and were in no small part about Africa itself. But I wasn't even that farsighted when I picked Cry, The Beloved Country off of the shelf. This next book decision was as random as most others. Cry was simply the first book I saw that I knew was on the show more 100 books list. Thus, by happy coincidence, I found myself further immersed in the future of the world I had just left.

In Things Fall Apart, the first death tolls for tribal life in Africa have just begun. In Cry, the Beloved Country, the funeral has long been over, and people are searching, grasping, for anything to take its place. As the land loses its ability to feed people, it also loses its ability to hold them. Men are drawn to the mines where there is work, and to the city of Johannesburg where there is the promise of something new, and they soon stop writing the ones they had loved back home. The Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo loses a brother to the city, and his brother-in-law to the mines. When his sister goes to the city to find her husband, she also disappears. His son soon follows. Finally the Reverend Kumalo receives a letter advising him of his sister's ill health, and he embarks on a quest to Johannesburg, to retrieve and rebuild his family.

Of course quests are never easy. And there really is something new going on in Johannesburg, something that no one has the ability to explain in words. But Alan Paton draws an immense, sweeping picture of a city in turmoil. It is a city where natives who are boycotting the buses for high fares walk miles to and from work each day -- often having just a few hours of sleep before they must wake and start the long trek again. It is a city where all the members of the ruling class agree that they are in a terrible crisis, but none can agree on what to do about it. It is a city where it is illegal to give a walking bus boycotter a ride to work, yet hundreds do it anyway. Kumalo witnesses both horrible cruelty and heart-breaking kindness while he searches the city for answers, and the reading this book, I felt the full force of both.

Had Cry, the Beloved Country only been about the search of one man for his family and his journey to and from Johannesburg, it still would have been a magnificent book. I was truly surprised when the book did not end at Kumalo's safe return home. Instead of ending at the obvious place, Paton chose that time to broaden the book's scope. The end result is a feeling of hope -- a much better place to leave off than the despair of Things Fall Apart. Where it is possible, I would always recommend these two books to be read together as a pair. If Things tears you apart, Cry will start to put you back together. show less

There's a reason why this book is a classic of 20th-century fiction. The story of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo, who travels to Johannesburg in search of his son and sister, still packs a wallop sixty years after it was published. Set in apartheid South Africa, Cry, The Beloved Country depicts the stark contrast between rural and urban life in that country, and puts on vivid display the absurdity of an unjust and inhuman social policy. Paton does not preach. Rather, he allows his characters to show more show us how living under apartheid affects their lives and the choices they make. Kumalo, an old man at the time of the action and painfully aware of his weaknesses, does not fight the system or even question it, and yet his struggle to make sense of it and somehow find solace in tragedy is full of passion and drama. A masterpiece. show less

The more works by Alan Paton that I read, the more I realize I never really understood his place in literature. He is not one of the world’s greatest writers; he is, however, one of the world’s great voices. Paton believed very deeply in opposing apartheid and his works are a monument to that belief. None of his books rank as extraordinary literature but all of them are important and all of them share his extraordinary and deeply felt passion. This book shows South Africa in the show more mid-1950s and it gains enormous power from its dual focus: an overview of apartheid nationally and small scenes that illustrate the meaning of that overview with extraordinary potency. Inhumanity and injustice on a nationwide scale becomes real and meaningful when well-chosen “little” acts illustrate bare facts. Acts of ordinary people, acts that spring from honest intentions and not what we now call "virtue-signaling," assume powerful significance here. The book excels at small acts, on both sides. Some are motivated by genuine humility and the acknowledgment of humanity of others, some do not. Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful is heavily factual. Paton relies on newspaper reports, correspondence, press releases, dialogue, and other methods. He includes real people and real events. The story is told by a number of different characters with different viewpoints; some story lines intersect, some don’t. But the book vividly, painfully recreates life and lives. Time and again I found myself stopping to look up a person or an event to learn more. Like everything of Paton’s that I have read, this is not a book I recommend for his exceptional literary qualities, although he is certainly an excellent writer. It is rather a book I consider essential for anyone who believes in humanity (both literally and figuratively). Given present circumstances in the United States, I’d say it’s a very timely book. show less