Cry the Beloved Country

A member of my Book Group had taken a week-long course on Alan Paton’s 1948 novel about South Africa and was able to instruct us in the parallels between it and the Biblical Book of Isaiah, in which can be found a redemptive pattern of destruction-repentance/penance-rebuilding/restoration.

The destruction of traditional South African culture and social cohesion, of the tribe, the family, and the individual is represented in the novel through the story of Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu Anglican pastor, whose narrative of loss intersects with that of James Jarvis, a white South African of English descent, whose son is killed by Kumalo’s son in an attempted burglary.

Both fathers, as well as other characters, undergo their own repentance and penance before achieving a renewal of hope through the rebuilding of family and the restoration of the valley in which both the Kumalo and Jarvis families live.

This intertextual relationship between Cry the Beloved Country and Isaiah is convincing and entirely appropriate for the white author and Christian protagonist of the novel. However, it also illustrates how the novel itself, by framing the story in terms of Western religion and Biblical traditions, serves to perpetuate the colonial culture which has caused the destruction of native South Africa in the first place.

Another example of intertextuality can be found in the repeated references to Abraham Lincoln, a hero to the young Arthur Jarvis, who has devoted his life to undoing the injustice that his white ancestors have done to the native land and its people before, ironically, he is killed by one of those native people.

Lincoln also, especially in his Second Inaugural Address, invokes the Bible as he frames the American Civil War in redemptive terms. War is the penance that must be suffered before the destruction that slavery has done to African people in North America can be redeemed. Repentance and forgiveness are also necessary before the nation can be rebuilt and restored. Thus Lincoln refrains from attacking the South or the Confederacy (“With malice toward none, with Charity for all…”), but looks forward with renewed hope to “a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

This parallel of American slavery with South African apartheid similarly frames colonial injustice in Western terms from a white perspective, as does the Biblical parallel of Isaiah. Perhaps no more could be expected from a white author on this subject.

One wonders, though, if it is the repentant white perspective that contributes to a novel in which there are no villains except the generalized colonial history and social system of apartheid (“With malice toward none, with Charity for all…”). Would a black African author have been so generous? Would blame and even malice from such an author be misplaced?

As the young black pastor Msimangu states, “I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.” Would a hateful attack on white colonists or on white America be justified by the tragic history of black South Africans and African Americans?

Is the redemption narrative a luxury of wish-fulfillment for the guilty or is it a universal human story of forgiveness and renewal? Or both?