Cry, the Beloved Country Observations

Maile Danilchik

1/22/17

10th Grade World Literature

Cry, The Beloved Country Paragraph Assignment #1

Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country. New York, Scribner, 2003.

   Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton is a novel placed in South Africa during the time of apartheid, meaning segregation. South Africa’s long history of being occupied by different European settlers had created a racially diverse population and many racial controversies to unfold in following years. The domestic disputes between white Afrikaners and black Africans were similar to white Americans and Native Americans in the United States, with a foreign group placing power over the existing people. The politics of those events were illustrated in Alan Paton’s novel through the eyes of the protagonist Reverend Stephen Kumalo. Kumalo is an older Zulu man whose family has been abandoning the countryside where he resides for the nearest westernized city of Johannesburg for the promise of prosperity in its gold mines. He receives a letter from his friend asking Kumalo to come quickly to Johannesburg because his sister is sick. Once he arrives in Johannesburg, he has a dinner with fellow religious leaders and their dinner discussion narrated the how the racial divisions of South Africa affected everyday life.

At the table “they talked of young criminal children, and older more dangerous criminals, of how white Johannesburg was afraid of black crime.” (Paton, 52)  Newspaper headlines had announced black on white crimes in Johannesburg that were spreading fear of black people through white communities. Kumalo questioned why it seemed African youths were committing crimes against white people, and his friend explained “White man has broken the tribe...But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten.” (Paton, 56) Kumalo’s friend is referencing the Boer-Zulu War in which Europeans took over native Zulu tribes in South Africa, and that perhaps the African descendants of these people were trying to create justice. I think that the crime depicted in Cry, the Beloved Country is a significant aspect of the politics in South Africa, showing how apartheid had negatively impacted domestic race relations.