Cry, the Beloved Country

My seatmate Daryl noticed I’ve been reading Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country on the plane. It’s undoubtedly the most important book ever written about apartheid, and that was way back in the late 1940’s. In the introduction, Paton tells about the clashes between black Africa and the Dutch settlers, and later the English (who started the Boer war over the gold found in the center of the country). Paton says, “The black people became truly a part of the white man’s mind,” and led him to spend the next century trying to keep the races apart. The only way to control the fear of engulfment (white people have never been more than 15% of the population) was to draw a clear line between the races, a separation that, like rising water behind a leaking dike, could not hold. Daryl told me that when he was a child, the separation was so thorough that he rarely saw a black person in Johannesburg, other than servants and laborers. I asked Daryl if his parents and grandparents realized that black rule was inevitable. He said, “No, I think they thought life would go on like that forever.” It was a huge shock, he said, when black people began to move in next door to them.

Should you wish to read South African literature about the peculiar and long-lasting social problems of South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country is your first choice. It is over half a century old, but still speaks. Nadine Gordimer (July’s People is the most famous) also wrote many books about the tensions in this oddly anachronistic colonial country, and more recently, J.M. Coetzee. All three are Nobel Prize winners.