Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton (1948)
“A Black South African priest walks into a city that is destroying his people, and a white farmer's grief becomes the first crack in apartheid's wall.”
At a Glance
In 1946 South Africa, Zulu priest Stephen Kumalo travels from his rural village to Johannesburg searching for his missing sister Gertrude and son Absalom. He finds Gertrude fallen into prostitution, Absalom imprisoned for the murder of a white liberal activist — Arthur Jarvis, son of Kumalo's neighbor James Jarvis. The two fathers, one Black and one white, meet across the chasm of grief and apartheid. James Jarvis, transformed by reading his dead son's writings about racial justice, begins to help Kumalo's village. Both men lose everything and, in losing it, find each other.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published simultaneously in the US and UK in February 1948, it became an immediate international bestseller — selling 100,000 copies in the first month, a staggering number for a debut novel about African racial politics. It introduced global audiences to the reality of South African racial injustice two years before the Afrikaner government's apartheid policies became internationally known. It is widely credited with first making the anti-apartheid cause legible to Western audiences. Paton himself was refused a passport by the South African government for years after its publication.
Diction Profile
Elevated and formal in narration; simplified and rhythmic in dialogue, deliberately echoing Zulu speech patterns through English syntax
High in narration, especially in landscape and emotional passages. Minimal in dialogue. Paton's metaphors are elemental