Cry, the Beloved Country Race

Let's say that you were talking to a priest in English. Would you address this person as "Reverend" at the end of every sentence? Probably not. But in the dialogue that takes place in Zulu in this novel, it's very common for Paton to repeat terms like umfundisi or umnumzana regularly, at the end of nearly every sentence, even though the rest of the dialogue in English.

This might be a way of showing differences in manners between Zulu and English speakers. It might also be a way for Paton to remind us that the characters may seem like they are speaking English, but they aren't. But the effect of this repetition of words like umfundisi is to make a lot of the Zulu conversations sound like formal songs with a regular refrain. It's a small thing, but Paton's sing-songy use of these terms can make the dialogue of Cry, the Beloved Country seem less natural and everyday.

We can think of two ways to look at this passage, where the narrator claims that Kumalo's wife's suffering is like the "suffering of oxen" because she is "mute." Either the narrator is saying that Kumalo's wife cannot speak her suffering, that she does not know how to express her sorrow because it is so deep.

Or it could mean that Kumalo's wife is not allowed to speak her suffering in some deep way, that there are social obstacles preventing black South African women like her from expressing their true feelings. After all, we get the sense from Cry, the Beloved Country that this is a deeply patriarchal world ("patriarchal" means controlled by men). In fact, we don't hear much from any of the women in the novel, black or white.

But Paton does specifically emphasize that he is talking about the muteness of black women here. In this world of both racial and gender prejudice, why might Kumalo's wife be "mute" in her suffering, in a way that the other characters are not? How might this passage be showing some of Paton's own biases?

The world Alan Paton is portraying in Cry, the Beloved Country is so totally segregated that Kumalo doesn't seem to notice that there is anything strange about riding in a separate train car because of the color of his skin. It's as though he's so used to it that it seems natural to him.

When Kumalo is sitting on the train to Johannesburg, he sees South Africa's great gold mines for the first time. We discuss the gold mines and their problems in our section on "Setting." Here, we just want to say that it's weird that this miner talking to Kumalo speaks so simplistically about his own work.

Even though he works in the gold mines, he says "fire-stick" rather than "dynamite," and he emphasizes that it is the "white men" who use these technologies, not him. So this miner comes across like a cog in a much larger machine, rather than like a worker who knows what he is doing. This brief conversation between Kumalo and the miner just underlines the fact that a lot of the black workers in South Africa's gold mines don't feel a sense of ownership of the mines. They perform a lot of hard manual labor, but they are not part of the management or organization of the mine at all.

Cry, the Beloved Country often emphasizes the importance of peaceful cooperation rather than outright revolution when it comes to racial issues in South Africa. So, here, Msimangu appreciates that white activists continue to train black nurses "until we have a place of our own" (in other words, until there are black medical academies). He is glad that black people can learn from their "friends amongst the white people." Msimangu sees a future of cooperation, rather than a world where only white people or only black people can receive certain kinds of educations.

In chapter 12, we hear a number of different viewpoints on crime rates in South Africa that do not belong to any central character in Cry, the Beloved Country. Paton is giving us an epic cross-section of common points of view from white South Africans on education, on prisons, and on pass laws (which are laws that required all black people in South Africa to register their addresses with the cops and to carry identification with them at all times (source).

Even without knowing the context of these speakers, we can tell that these conversations are happening among white people because of little hints in the dialogue. So, in this exchange, there is a character named "Jackson," which isn't a common Zulu or Xosa name. And then we also have the use of the term "we" and "natives." The "we" sends the "natives" to prison, which sets up a distance between "us" and those others, the natives. So the implication is that the speaker is talking about "we" white people, and including himself in that group.

In this chapter, why don't we hear conversations among randomly selected black characters? Are there other parts of the novel that provide a similar selection of opinions from black characters?

The "we" and "our" in this passage suggests that the narrator is speaking from the perspective of a white person. How does this subtle white perspective at the level of the narration affect your sense of this book's racial politics? Do you think that the book asks a particular set of questions because it starts with an assumption of "our whiteness"? Also, what does Paton view as the primary problem that prevents white people from overcoming their racism in South Africa? What are some of the reasons he gives for why there is so much prejudice among white South Africans?

When Kumalo first talks to Absalom's girlfriend after Absalom has been arrested, he asks her how old she is, and she says that she doesn't know. This sense that the black characters do not keep track of time appears in other parts of the books, as, for example, when Kumalo thinks of his own slowness in the second passage. What do you think the second passage's "slow tribal rhythm" is? How does it differ from other ways of keeping time? And how is it possible that time itself can be faster or slower for characters from different races and cultures?

Here, Paton shows something complicated about race in South Africa. Not only are there huge, awful divisions between black and white communities, but there is also prejudice between language groups within the white population of South Africa. The Afrikaners speak Afrikaans, a language that comes from the Dutch spoken by 17th-century settlers in southern Africa. Historically, there has been a lot of conflict between these Afrikaners and the British settlers who came to South Africa later on, largely in pursuit of South Africa's mineral wealth.

In this passage, we see that Jarvis's father would have "disinherit[ed] any child of his who married an Afrikaner." But now, "times had changed." So if the Afrikaners and the British can learn to get along, the novel seems to imply, surely times will also change for black and white South Africans?

What do you think the "deep experience" is in this passage? What allows the "young white man" (the guy from Absalom's reform school) to break "the custom" by helping Kumalo into the courtroom? We think that it might have something to do with personal feeling: the young white man's sympathy for Kumalo allows him to overcome the Court's racist social customs to help an elderly black man. Personal feeling between people can help to overcome prejudice, the novel argues.

Alan Paton does not play into stereotyped representations of prison life in this passage. Here, even though he emphasizes that Absalom's guard is a white warder, the man is still sympathetic enough to the tragedy of Kumalo's last meeting with his son that he does give them a little more time together. Once again, we think that Paton is trying to emphasize the sadness of Absalom's fate without necessarily calling for a revolution against the whole racist system of authority that has led to Absalom's position in this prison. He doesn't want to encourage rage against the Man; he wants to focus on reform and on making things better. This sympathetic white prison guard prevents us from making easy assumptions about the cruelty of individual people with power in this system.