My Recommendation for Cry, The Beloved Country

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	• Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton Vintage, 2002 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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My Recommendation for Cry, The Beloved Country

I read this book for an English class and was hesitant about reading it. Right from the start Paton hooks the reader in by using descriptive language and imagery. Paton really makes you feel for Umfundisi, his family, and especially his son. Umfundisi is a pastor at a church in, small town, Ixopo. His brothers' family, his own son, and his sister have gone to Johannesburg, a big city falling into the despair from crime and hatred. Umfundisi gets word that his sister is ill and must travel there to get her. Both his trip there and his experiences and hardships once in the city strengthen him and his faith in people and God. Although he is there in Johannesburg to retrieve his sister, he ends up contacting his brother whose son has gotten into trouble with Umfundisis' son. Once he has found his sister, he travels all around Johannesburg and surrounding towns to find his son. Even though only a small amount of time passes in Johannesburg, Umfundisi ages immensely form the trials he encounters. Once home he has a new person to raise and realizes that his small town is there for him no matter what happened in Johannesburg. The members of his church rejoiced when he got home telling him that no other pastor is quite like there own. I recommend this book to people who need to strengthen their faith in others and in themselves. If you want a book that will make you cry at one point but at the end makes your heart fell good this is the book for you.

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Cry as you can feel the pain.

Dating from 1948, this book is at least as powerful now as when it was written, and was on the list of banned books in the old (white ruled) regime in South Africa. It is a simple story of a poor black pastor as he journeys to Johannesburg in search first of his sister, then of his son, and then relatives of sundry others from the locality. The black pastor also finds his brother, who like many caught within the magnet of J'burg, is not recognisable as the man that departed the countryside.

Alan Paton produced a well crafted and consistently understated volume. From the storyline, lots of sub-plots are interwoven. It is not an open indictment of the apartheid ("separate development") system that was increasingly introduced in South Africa in the late 1940's and 1950's - but yet it is. Almost in a subliminal way, there is a questioning of what is going on in the beautiful country, whilst appearing to "just" tell a tale.

Three books make up the story, although it would not make sense to read one alone or to read them out of order. Paton has a strange symmetry; the first and second books begin in the same way, with almost the same words for half a page of each. I found myself turning back to the opening lines of chapter 1 as I read the first chapter of the second book.

The story left me crying more than once, and when not crying on the outside, I was usually internally. From the mid point, there is an eerie inevitability about the gentle unfolding of the story. You know what is going to happen, at least in part, but it does not stop you reading further.

The cry of the title may be the cry of the author because the land is broken, and the tribe is broken. Paton refers to the tribe, but means the tribal system, with stability and knowing one's position. At the end of the volume, after the events in the storyline, there is some small mending of land and tribe taking place. It is perhaps the beginnings of hope. You have to divorce yourself from the historical reality of the country, as to whether that hope was realised.

I read an American edition. The author's note describes the extra-ordinary help given by an American couple to meet a hard deadline with potential publishers. That in itself lifted me up, and perhaps prepared me for the uplifting pages to follow.

I wish that I had read this book previously. The story-line is fiction, but the message is truth of the most powerful kind.

Peter Morgan (morganp@supanet.com)

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Heartbreaking, Must Read Story

"Cry, the Beloved Country" gives us an inside look at South African apartheid in the 1940's. We live this story through the eyes of a poor Zulu pastor who decides to travel from his small village to Johannesburg in hopes to save his son from mounting troubles. The migration of gold mine workers to the cities has increased the crime rate due to the separation of families. Exploitation of these laborers has caused a political unrest in Johannesburg.

Stephen Kumalo, our Zulu pastor, has to question his own parenting and lifestyle when he sees the poor decision making of his own son. Stephen meets a varied barrage of people, some who help and some who choose silence as the easiest way to stay out of trouble, when searching for his son.

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is a must read book. The story gave me insight on this foreign culture and the hardships experienced by not only the exploited workers of the South African gold mines, but the destroyed families of said workers. This book is mandatory criterion for schools in South Africa and it is worthy of this praise.

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