This year, I will arrive in South Africa on July 4th.  While July 4th is not South Africa’s Independence Day, I believe that it is a great date for me to arrive and experience my first trip there.  For the  majority of South Africans, their independence occurred when apartheid ended in 1994, a fairly recent date in our lifetime.  In the 1970s and 1980s, college students and faculty members were the major voices of conscience pressuring the United States Congress and U.S. corporations to boycott South African goods and products in order to force an end to the apartheid policies.   I distinctly remember the shanty towns that were erected at my alma mater and other colleges across the country to protest the living conditions in South Africa. 

As I travel through South Africa on and around the time of this significant American holiday, I am aware of the sacrifices made by blacks and other minorities in South Africa in order to achieve equality and true democracy.  I am looking forward to my visit and will share my thoughts about the trip after I return.

As you enjoy picnics, parades, and time with family and friends tomorrow, I encourage you to take a moment to salute our nation’s flag.  I also hope you will pause remember those who have sacrificed their lives to protect the freedoms for which it stands, consider those around the world who have only recently been granted the rights and freedoms that we enjoy as Americans, and remember that there are others still struggling under governments that refuse to provide those fundamental rights to their citizens.

On this day as on all others, we should all be proud to be Americans.

Alan Paton

The time, the people, and the events that Kumalo encounters on the trip comprise the richness of this book.  Kumalo leaves Natal for a trip to Johannesburg to find his sister, Gertrude.  He finds her only to discover that she is not physically sick but has become a prostitute and bootlegger.  He finds his brother, John, and discovers that he has become a leader of the black movement for freedom, while cautiously being more of an orator than an open law-breaker.  He finds his son, Absalom, after Absalom has been arrested for the murder of a prominent white engineer, Arthur Jarvis, who has been leading the national discussion about freeing the blacks.

I usually write reviews of non-fiction books but the beauty of a novel is in the way the author weaves the story’s narrative until the end.  In the event that someone reads this review and opts to read Cry, the Beloved Country for the first time, I have chosen not to write a descriptive narrative about the way the story ends but instead about its ending paragraph.  The book ends with Reverend Kumalo meditating on a mountain top at dawn.  Kumalo has a reason for his personal journey to the mountaintop, but Paton uses the ending as a metaphor for the dawn of the emancipation of native South Africans.   The book ends with a prophetic sentence that is almost a question:  “But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”

I selected Cry, the Beloved Country because it was a book that I had never read and a book that argued for equality of the races in South Africa long before there was an organized international outcry against apartheid.  In fact, the book was written before the Afrikaner Nationalist Party won the 1948 election and implemented the official policy of apartheid.  Paton’s description of the trials and tribulations of the blacks in South Africa was risky given his status as a free white South African.

Paton’s incorporation of the readings of Abraham Lincoln into the novel indicates that he believed that whites in South Africa could see the importance of helping the blacks achieve liberation and financial independence even though for a white to do so was unpopular at the time.  It took nearly 50 years after the publication of this book for apartheid to end, but it probably would not have ended as quickly as it did had there not been a group of whites like Paton who continually pushed to end the practice.

Cry, the Beloved Country describes the land that attracted the first white immigrants to settle it, the black tribesmen who were natives, and the tribes who migrated to South Africa.  All of them loved the land and cherished it in many ways.  I enjoyed reading the book given the retrospective viewpoint we have post-apartheid, and I look forward to my visit to South Africa.