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.”
Short Summary
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.
Detailed Summary
The novel opens with a lyrical evocation of a valley in Natal, South Africa — the hills that hold the rain, the valley that was once beautiful, the erosion that has stripped the red earth bare. This landscape is the novel's first argument: the land itself is broken by what has been done to it. Step...