Every moviegoer is familiar with the scene. There is a bundle of dynamite waiting menacingly. A match is struck and touched to the end of the long fuse. Slowly the flame eats its way along the wire. Paralyzed with fear, you follow its progress toward the explosives.
Attempts have been made to stop the blast but to no avail. In a few moments, so to speak, the earth will be rocked by the powerful detonation, and the world will be staggered by the statistics of the dead and dying.
By the time you are reading this guide to Cry, the Beloved Country the catastrophe may have already taken place, for the above description applies to the volatile Republic of South Africa. There, the long time tensions between blacks and whites have been expected to result in a massive upheaval, accompanied by great pain and bloodshed. If the blacks, the majority group in South Africa, cannot gain control of their country through an orderly process, we may yet see the dynamite, the symbol of their latent power, explode in a deafening roar.
One person who has been striving mightily to prevent the horror is Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country. He has spoken out against apartheid, his country’s policy of racial segregation with the minority group of whites in control. Using his talent as a writer, Paton has protested against the demeaning policy of apartheid. Through his articles and stories he has worked to cut the fuse before the dynamite is reached. As you learn about Paton’s life, you will come to
understand why he has waged his passionate crusade against racial prejudice and its ugly by-products.
Let’s go back to a September afternoon in 1946 when the homesick Alan Paton returned to his hotel room in Norway and wrote these lines: There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grasscovered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.
As the principal of a reform school in South Africa, he was studying prisons for the young in Norway, Sweden, Canada, and the United States. The words he wrote about the hills of his home province of Natal released a torrent of thoughts for the lonely Paton. He thought about his country, its people, and the causes of the high crime rate among young blacks in South Africa. By the time he reached San Francisco in early 1947, he had completed the manuscript of Cry, the Beloved Country. As recently as 1982, Paton still spoke of the 1948 publication of Cry, the Beloved Country as the central event of his life.
Like Arthur Jarvis in this famous novel, Paton came from an English-speaking family in the South African province of Natal. He was born in Pietermaritzburg on January 11, 1903. His mother was a third-generation South African of English descent. His father was a Scot who had come to South Africa as a civil servant just before the South African (or Boer) War (1899-1902).
Paton’s childhood came during a time of promise. The British, who were relatively forward-looking on racial matters, had won the South African War, a bloody conflict with the Boers. (Boers, or Afrikaners, are descended from settlers of mainly Dutch, French Huguenot, and German descent. They speak the Afrikaans language, which is derived largely from Dutch.) In 1910 the British linked Natal, Transvaal, Cape, and the Orange Free State to form the self-governing Union of South Africa.
Paton’s parents held comparatively liberal political views. They also taught their children that Afrikaners had a right to preserve their own culture. Paton was educated at a high school for white boys, Maritzburg College in Pietermaritzburg, and then Natal University College, where he majored in math and physics. At the university college he not only gained an education, but also broadened his understanding of Afrikaners, blacks, Coloureds (as persons of mixed ancestry are called by the government of South Africa), and Indians. He was especially active in the Student Christian Association, a society dear to Paton’s hero, the South African political leader Jan Hofmeyr. Unlike Paton, Hofmeyr was of Boer descent, but he urged his fellow Boers to abandon bitter memories and to work for the good of all South Africans.
As a young man Paton also learned to speak both Afrikaans and Zulu, like Arthur Jarvis in Cry, the Beloved Country. In fact, Paton might be taken as a model for Arthur- a man with strong Christian beliefs who gradually decides he wants to devote his life to improving race relations in his country.
In 1925 Paton began teaching at the white high school in Ixopo. (His love of the area shows in Cry, the Beloved Country, from the first two sentences on.)
While teaching in Ixopo, Paton met Doris Olive Francis, a third-generation South African whose husband was ill with tuberculosis. In 1928, three years after her husband died, she and Paton were married. The strong attachment to the Anglican Church that Paton developed in this period in his life shows in Cry, the Beloved Country- all the major characters are Anglican.
The newly married couple moved to Pietermaritzburg so that Paton could take a more promising job at his old high school. Six years later he suffered a severe attack of typhoid and was hospitalized for more than two months. During his recuperation he decided he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life teaching the sons of the rich. By that time Jan Hofmeyr was Minister of Education, so Paton asked his advice. Hofmeyr and the Prime Minister, Jan Christiaan Smuts, had just gotten three reformatories for delinquents under age 21 transferred from the justice department to the ministry of education. Hofmeyr advised his friend to apply for the job of warden at all three places.
Paton did apply, despite his lack of experience in the criminal justice system, and was appointed warden of Diepkloof Reformatory for African Juvenile Delinquents, a grim place outside Johannesburg enclosed by a barbed-wire stockade.
Even Hofmeyr said, “It is hard to know what can be done with it,” but Paton was excited- at the age of 32 he’d been given a prison to turn into a school. Like the young white man from the reformatory in Cry, the Beloved Country, he felt he had a chance to change the lives of young blacks. The job lasted from 1935 to 1948, a period during which Paton also wrote articles like those in Arthur Jarvis’ desk drawer. In fact, one of Paton’s essays- “Who Is Really to Blame for the Crime Wave in South Africa?” (The Forum, December 15, 1945)- presents the themes of the novel as well as those of Arthur’s paper in Chapter 20 on the causes of crime among young blacks.
Given a free hand, Paton transformed Diepkloof. It held 400 boys (later more than 600), mostly blacks of the Xhosa ethnic group. He was appalled at the joyless atmosphere, and, every morning, at the stench. After supper and a full workday on the prison farm, the boys were locked up for 14 hours. From 5:00 P.M. to
7:00 A.M. they used buckets in their cells as latrines. Paton immediately began opening cell blocks till 9:00 P.M., starting with those of the younger boys, so they could use the prison bathrooms till then. He also let the boys romp, sing, and paint pictures on the whitewashed walls. By the time he was opening all the cell blocks, he had also had more bathrooms built. His changes brought some joy to the place, eliminated the morning stink, and also ended the typhoid outbreaks that had previously caused many deaths.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Paton tried to enlist in the South African army, but education officials considered him too valuable to let go. By the time the war ended in 1945, Paton was considered an authority on criminal rehabilitation, but he wondered how other countries ran penal institutions for the young. To find out, he financed an eight-month study trip. He didn’t leave home with the intention of writing a novel while traveling. What started him off, that September afternoon in Norway, was a tour of the cathedral of Trondheim. The
beauty of its famous rose window made him yearn to write about his beautiful homeland and its people. As Paton explains in an Author’s Note to Cry, the Beloved Country, it was in San Francisco that friends read his manuscript and started contacting publishers. The book was first published in New York in early 1948.
The novel sold well both in North America and in Great Britain. It was soon translated into some 20 languages, and made into a film in England (1952) and a musical in the United States (Lost in the Stars, 1949, script by the playwright Maxwell Anderson and music by the German-American composer Kurt Weill).
The South African edition, dedicated to Jan Hofmeyr, came out three months before Hofmeyr’s death at age 54 in December 1948. Book sales in South Africa were second only to those of the Bible, and Paton became famous.
Critic James Stern in the New Republic called it “one of the best novels of our time.” And Orville Prescott, The New York Times book reviewer, wrote in the Yale Review that Paton’s novel was “the finest I have ever read about the tragic plight of black-skinned people in a white man’s world.” Another event of importance to the Patons also occurred in 1948- the coming to power of the Nationalist Party, pledged to separation of the races in every sphere of life. At Diepkloof the Patons had ignored people’s color in forming friendships, and they could not endure the new government’s opposition to interracial association. With the success of his novel making Paton influential, he ultimately became a full-time writer and spokesman against injustice. Years later, in For You Departed, he wrote about the novel and that time period: “It is a song of love for one’s far distant country.... It is a story of the beauty and terror of human life.... Just how good it is, I do not know and do not care. All I know is that it changed our lives. It opened the doors of the world to us, and we went through.” In 1953 the Liberal Association of South Africa (later the Liberal Party) was formed, and Paton was named its first national chairman. For the next 15 years Paton’s life was dominated by activities of the racially mixed party, by writing plays for multiracial casts and audiences, and by political writing and speaking.
One play, Mkhumbane, drew packed houses in Durban City Hall in 1960- a time of peaceful black protest against apartheid at Sharpeville and Cape Town that was dealt with extremely harshly by the government.
For his work on behalf of the people of South Africa and against the evils of apartheid, Paton has received international recognition. In 1960, the noted American poet Archibald MacLeish toasted Alan Paton when the South African received the Freedom Award from Freedom House: To live at the center of the contemporary maelstrom; to see it for what it is and to challenge the passions of those who struggle in it beside him with the voice of reason- with the enduring reasons of love; to offer the quiet sanity of the heart in a city yammering with the crazy slogans of fear; to do all this at the cost of tranquility and the risk of harm, as a service to a government which does not know its needs is to deserve more of history than we can give to Alan Paton.
Until shortly before her death in 1967, Paton’s wife typed all of his work, including the novel Too Late the Phalarope (1953), the story collection Tales from a Troubled Land (1961), and the biography Hofmeyr (1964). Since her death, Paton’s best-known work includes For You Departed (1969), a memoir dedicated to her, and The Long View (1968), a collection of articles from a Liberal Party publication. More recent is his novel set in the 1950s, Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful (1981)- the title is a phrase borrowed from bewildered tourists who give up trying to understand South African politics.
All of Paton’s books show his love of his country and his compassion for all South Africans. He still hopes that violence there will end, that the dynamite will never be ignited, and that the views that will prevail will be like those of Arthur Jarvis and Msimangu in Cry, the Beloved Country.