by Neil Deo

Created on: July 21, 2008

BOOK REVIEW: CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY, by A. Paton

Alan Paton, author and liberal politician, died in his native South Africa in 1992. He died a happier man than when he had witnessed the Nationalist Party, Afrikaner-dominated rightwing white supremacists, win election after election since 1948, that same year his wonderful novel about uber-segregation was first published. Paton died happy in the knowledge that Nelson Mandela had been freed, at last, after 27 years as the "guest" of the apartheid government on a barren, windswept island near Cape Town. The author had spent his life ministering especially to his own fears and loves. His love for the land, especially toward the rolling hills of KwaZulu Natal, is as patriotically colorful as that of his characters, the increasingly impoverished tribal South Africans, as well as with rapidly restless African migrant labor that made South Africa's mines the most profitable for a century. In "CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY," Paton did what Mandela would do as president: acknowledge all the sub-national groups that make up the nation, acknowledge differences yet emphasize that no group had a monopoly on morality, ethics, religious consistency, and an inclusive nationalism. He had seen good white men and women, as they appear rather accurately in this 1948 classic, joined with rural and urban actors, with "Black, Coloured and Indian" South Africans, and with diffident spiritual leaders, help dismantle apartheid and dictatorship.

Paton was too astute to write in a way that would allow the apartheid government to ban the book; so his tale of the failure of the vision of the Afrikaners (white people descended from Dutch settlers) is told through the moral, family and tribal failings of a Zulu village parson, Stephen Kumalo, who only discovers the "City" when his son - and other family members - have gone astray, and for personal temptations, failings and crimes, rather than a political struggle per se. The raises, subtly, the question about the destructive wetsern models of development, and the inability of mines to provide workers decent wages or lives.

CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY appears to be a South African test of the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son for the black father, Reverend Kumalo. On the arrival of a delayed, soiled letter regarding family concerns in Johannesburg, Kumalo must hurriedly leave Natal (the rather Eden-like South African province evocatively presented by Paton in Chapter 1) on an unexpected mission

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