چه کسی می‌تواند دل را از شکستن بازدارد؟!

Audiobook narrated by Frederick Davidson.

And old man, a Zulu pastor in a small impoverished South African town, has lost three dear relatives to the big city. His brother, John, has gone to Johannesburg and opened a business. He no longer writes. His much younger sister, Gertrude, took her son to Johannesburg to look for her husband who had gone previously to find work; the husband never wrote, and Gertrude has not written. And finally his son, Absalom, went to Johannesburg to look for his aunt, and he too has been swallowed up by the big city and no longer writes. So when he receives a letter from a priest in J-burg giving news of Gertrude, Stephen Kumalo travels to the city to find his family members and bring them home.

First published in 1948, Cry the Beloved Country has remained an international bestseller. It tells of a personal tragedy, but also of a national tragedy – apartheid. The writing is lyrical and evocative of time and place. Stephen is a gentle hero, who derives his strength from faith, hope and charity. His capacity for love and forgiveness is admirable. I was surprised, and touched, by the compassion and forgiveness shown by Jarvis (the white farmer in the village).

Their personal tragedy is the focus on the novel, but it is framed by the larger issues facing South Africa – the loss of tribal culture, poverty, flight to the already overcrowded city slums – and issues facing all humankind – justice, good governance, retribution, compassion, and forgiveness.

Frederick Davidson does a good job narrating, but I did find his narration very slow. His very slow delivery made it hard for me to get engaged in the story, but grew on me, as the character of Stephen Kumalo is revealed – he is a man who takes his time pondering and deliberating over issues, a man who never acts in haste.

This is the story of South Africa, and it is the story of two fathers and two sons. There is a moment in which the fathers meet face-to-face that contains everything there is of humanity and the struggle for understanding and compassion in men. That moment left me eviscerated.

I love that this is not written in the spirit of good vs. evil, but in the spirit of man vs. his baser instincts. I sincerely loved Stephen Kumalo and Mr. Jarvis, and I felt both their heartaches. Some books are meant to be written, they well up from inside an author and spill onto the page because their message is one that must be voiced, and this is such a book.

The history of South Africa is sad and, like all colonializations, it is complicated. There is a way of life destroyed and no attempt to offer a replacement that is viable for the native population.

It suited the white man to break the tribe, he continued gravely. But it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken.

In the midst of this chaos and struggle, Paton finds the wisdoms that make humans reflections of God. Msimangu says But there is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power. The more I contemplated that statement, the more profound it seemed to me.

Much of what afflicts the people of South Africa at the time of this book’s publication has been remedied, but its message is so strong and so important and so universal that it can easily be applied to much of what we continue to see in the world today. And, at a more personal level, there are the feelings of the men involved that are so true to feelings each of us have or may have.

This was almost the last thing that his son had done. When this was done he had been alive. Then at this moment, at this very word that hung in the air, he had got up and gone down the stairs to his death. If one could have cried then, don’t go down! If one could have cried, stop, there is danger! But there was no one to cry. No one knew then what so many knew now.

Are these not the thoughts that run through our minds at the moment of loss? Why didn’t I do this or that? Why wasn’t I watching closer? Why didn’t I speak up, hold on, stop fate by altering the time frame by one precious second?

I understand that this novel is now included in many high school curricula, and I applaud that. Everyone should read it.

Had I known what this was about, and had not judged this book by the title (which led me to assume that this would be another depressing commentary on Apartheid), I would have picked it up YEARS ago!

Contrary to what the title suggests, this book highlights the hope in South Africa, even before the dark days of Apartheid really began. It shows forgiveness, and people of different races working together. It does not shy away from the problems: the exploitation of black people who were forced to work for a pittance for the benefit of the white mine owners, the crime that was causing people to be scared in their own homes, the potential danger of not heeding the warnings about changing the forced inequality...

The wisdom in this book was unexpected. It highlighted how the destruction of the tribal life left people unprepared for the new city life that they were being forced to enter for work. The words written by the man who was murdered rang so true when he spoke about the necessity for change. Nor can one, living in the New South Africa, not appreciate the truth in the final statement: “I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good for their country, come together to work for it.
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.”

Beautifully written, this book is quotable on almost every page. I would highly recommend it to anyone who has any interest in racial issues, South Africa or Africa as a whole.

This is one of those books that are well written but somewhat forgettable. While, it has a strong message and gives you a more hopeful image of mankind it feels a bit contrived. I tend to lean on the pessimistic side so I tend to not be the right audience for this book. Not to say this book is a bunch of hokum; it is in fact a heartfelt piece of work which tries to make sense of a senseless situation. Even in its attempt to answer the question of why it realizes it is not a question that will have an explicit answer. For how can a person tell an answer when they do not even know the answer themselves.

This is a story about a simple parson Stephen Kumalo living in the hinterlands of South Africa who seeks to find out what is going on with his relations (sister and son) in the bustling city of Johannesburg. Alan Paton, the author is careful not to be too accusatory in his depiction of the burgeoning metropolis. It is easy for an author to lose objectivity in detailing the differences between rural and urban areas. While, J-burg has all of the negative trappings of a major city, (traffic, crime, fear, mistrust, centralized poverty) it also is a place where like minded people can gather to create a more unified country. A city of that size represents excitement and hope along with all of its inherent flaws. Kumalo meets all kind of inhabitants from sinners to saints, he meets family who treat him like strangers and strangers who treat him like family.

In this personal hubbub lies the question of what is going to become of South Africa? Is it going to continue to be a stratified country based on a strict policy of racial division or is it going to be a more inclusive country with opportunity for both native and non-native populations? This book does a credible job of discussing the South African question without turning it into a boring lecture. By showing an honorable man like Kumalo lose so much but still have the nerve and tenacity to still continue, we get a valuable lesson without the hectoring. Paton is able to show something historical like finding a new gold mine or a busing strike without letting it override the narrative. It is his subtle ability to interweave fact with storyline that is his greatest triumph.

Though written in exile, Paton is able to showcase a number of undercurrents in South African society. There is the division between rural and urban, between black and white between labor and big business and most importantly between the old traditional ways of doing and the new modern approach. With all of these trends occurring it is a tragic and deeply personal event which triggers most of the changes that affect the characters more than any social or political event could. It is this event which turns one characters grief into a blessing for his whole community. I do not know if it is irony or divinity but only in tragically passing could one character spurn the good works which led to the improvement of so many.

زمانی‌ که ترس بر ملتی حکومت می‌کند؛ کیست که بتواند از سرزمین محبوب خود لذتی ببرد؟

آلن بيتون

Audiobook #195

this is a shit book

"But there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power."

Stephen Kumalo is a Zulu and a Anglican priest living in a small farming community set aside for the natives. One day he and his wife receive a letter from Johannesburg, urging him to come visit the city because his sister Gertrude needs help. Many people from his tribe have gone to the city and never returned, including his own son, so Stephen sets off to try and find them.

The city is a bewildering place for simple tribal priest and Stephen is soon taken advantage of but he is befriended by the Reverend Msimangu, the man who sent the letter to him, who helps Stephen find his way around and locate missing family members. He first finds his sister Gertrude who has fallen to alcohol and prostitution. She has a child who is unkempt and neglected. He takes them both to his boarding house, intent on bringing them both back home to the village. He also finds his brother who has been rallying the natives to fight back against exploitation of the miners and unfair wages. His words are dangerous and he is seen as a threat by the whites.

But Stephen is most anxious to find his son and with help from Msimangu follow the trail from one lead to another. Along the way Stephen learns that his son got a young girl pregnant and spent time incarcerated in a rehabilitation program, only to be released and disappear again.

When a white man is murdered by a native Stephen fears the worst, that his son may be the perpetrator, because not only is Arthur Jarvis a white man, but is also an outspoken political activist against apartheid and the son of James Jarvis, his neighbour and landowner near his home village. Days later, his son Absalom, when he is approached by the police confesses to being the murderer.

The murder forces both fathers are forced to reflect on their own lives. Stephen initially loses his faith, but regains it through the kindness of others whilst James, despite having lost his son to black crime, begins to study what his son had written about it and begins to see things in a different light, even developing a relationship, albeit a distant one, with his son’s killer's father and his black neighbours.

“Sorrow is better than fear,"............ "Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.”

I am a big fan of reading books about history, in particular social history and even more so if it is about post-colonialism. So a book on South Africa and/or apartheid is right up my street even if it can be at times uncomfortable reading for a white male. Although this book was written before the end of apartheid and as such is thankfully a little dated now, I still found it an incredibly emotional read offering as it does, a small glimpse into a terrible injustice that I can only imagine.

Alan Paton is a white South African and when the book was published it was an enormous success around the world but banned in the author's home country afraid that it might challenge the status quo! This is a book packed full of Christian themes such as faith, forgiveness and atonement but also looks at how western civilization's encroachment on the native Zulu tribes and families has been severely detrimental to them. With only roughly 10% of the land being given over to the native population there is not enough land to feed their own families and in particular with not enough land to safely rear and feed their cattle, a status symbol to the tribesmen, the land that they have got has become over-grazed and is dying meaning that many of the young men and women are forced to leave their ancestral lands in search of work and money in the cities and mines leaving only the old, the very young and the infirm behind them. Once away from their tribal elders these young men and women find it hard to resist temptation and follow a righteous path. They are taken advantage of, paid slave wages and so the crime rate soars. Although Johannesburg was rife with racism and apartheid, it was heart-warming to see acts kindness between people, both black and white. In a book filled with so much pain examples of occasional kindness was welcome.

"I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they have turned to loving, they will find that they are turned to hating."

I found this a very powerful at at times moving read but there were also a few elements about the writing that made me a little uncomfortable even a little offensive in out hopefully more enlightened times. Especially because the author is white. Too often the natives are depicted as very simple people, with simple minds, and even described as “children” completely incompatible with western civilization, big cities, and temptation. But perhaps worst of all there seems to be a suggestion, probably unintended, that God was in fact white. These are only minor quibbles and any future reader must recognise the society into which this book was published but in today's world they are enough to stop me from rewarding this otherwise gripping book top marks. Sorry!

This book should be read within its historical context. It is beautifully written and is amazing in the manner in which it foresaw so much South African experiences that was still to occur.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. If I'm awarding star ratings for the books message, then it's 5 stars. However, if I'm honest about how much I enjoyed the reading experience, or how eager I was to pick it up, then I have to admit that I didn't love it. In terms of the story, I cannot fault the book. There is nothing I would change about the plot, all the themes of heartbreak were perfectly placed. There was also inspiration to be found in the end message, which again, was faultless.

So what was wrong? Well, at times the grammar was confusing. It wasn't always clear who was talking or which characters were being spoken about, so I needed to re-read passages trying to make sense of what was happening, which removed me from the story. I also felt a disconnect with all of the characters, I really didn't care about any of them, which wasn't what I expected from such an emotional book. Perhaps this was due to the sentence structure, or perhaps I'm just cold and heartless, or maybe I've read too many other heartbreaking stories to be affected by this one. I'm not sure I can put my finger on what didn't work and in retrospect this is a much better book than I felt it was while reading. A complicated 3-4 stars for me.

Alan Paton's 1948 novel, Cry the Beloved Country, is a tale that embraces so very many things well beyond the period of Apartheid in South Africa; among them are the power of faith, the resolute strength of family bonds, the capacity for resilience, urban vs. rural environments, the concept of forgiveness & even beyond that, of reconciliation, all of these portrayed within an abiding biblical context.



Amazingly, the novel was written by someone whose life was spent as a teacher, including for 14 years at a progressive reform school for native (African) offenders, with no initial consideration of becoming a novelist. The gestation process for Alan Paton's manuscript constitutes a story in itself.

The reader is met with a portrait of the abiding prejudice & inequality within South Africa's Dutch-descended Afrikaners' strictly-enforced & particularly rigid response to racial segregation, separating its citizens into either Blank/White or Nie-Blank/Non-White but with 2 additional sub-classes, Asian & Colored, or mixed-race. However, the novel was actually published a few months prior to the installation of Apartheid by the National Party government in 1948.



Much of the story is set in the small town of Ndotsheni, Natal Province of South Africa where the main character, Stephen Kumalo & his family live in a consistent state of borderline poverty, until their life is upended both by a drought and Stephen's son Absalom's fall from grace within the shanty-town slums of Johannesburg where he has gone in search of his older sister.

Stephen Kumalo is always referred to as Umfúndisi (a Zulu word that is pronounced: "oom-foon-dees"), a term of respect meaning "parson". In fact, he is an Anglican priest presiding over his small church & a school, both in decline. His clothes are in tatters & his clerical collar stained brown but his sense of hope & his faith in God are never anything but robust.

Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who indeed knows why there can be comfort in a world of desolation? God be thanked that there is a beloved one who can lift up the heart in suffering, that one can play with a child in the face of such misery.

Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal, even the name of a river that runs no more. Wise men write many books in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all of our struggle is beyond all human wisdom. Oh God, my God, do not forsake me.

Without, intending to give away the specifics of plot or the conclusion of this tale, it involves two families, one white (that of Mr. Jarvis) & the other much less so. They are ultimately brought together in a way that is transformational for both in this novel, which occurs in the midst of the scourge of Apartheid (in place from 1948 to 1984), a time when the book must have been seen as a beacon of hope to those who longed for its demise. Because of the author's strong feelings in favor of racial equality & his membership in the Liberal Party Alan Paton's passport was seized, preventing him from travel outside his homeland for a decade.

In the novel, the passages detailing the pain that the well-off white character of Mr. Jarvis is confronted with in having to endure the aftermath of his late son's death are most uplifting, at least for me. Belatedly, Mr. Jarvis comes to know his son's passion for life and for the cause of black South Africans in a manner that would have been impossible had he lived to continue the struggle, having embraced the message of Christ and that of Abraham Lincoln, both of whose images adorn the son's former office. And in that moment of recognition, his life and other lives are transformed.



Arthur, the son of James Jarvis, has come to the conclusion that "our natives today produce criminals & prostitutes & drunkards, not because it is their nature to do so but because their tribal system of order & tradition & convention has been destroyed." It is felt that African tribal culture, in spite of its faults, did constitute a moral system. Left in his unpublished manuscript is the thought that those in power in S. Africa had an "inescapable duty to set up another system" & to end the segregation of the races. Instead of a son following the pattern outlined in daily living by his father' life, it becomes the reverse in Payton's novel.

For here is the novel's uplifting message:

Cry the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of the land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

In not wishing to reveal some aspects of the novel, I inevitably shortchange it. However, it speaks deeply to the forces of kinship & hope that can guide one through a seemingly faith-shattering, almost impossible personal hardship. And beyond that, Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country seems to me a timeless tale that offers a message about the potential for forgiveness and well beyond that, for a reconciliation with one's fate in life. Rarely, I suspect are 2 lives so entwined as that of Mr. Jarvis & Mr. Kumalo, resulting as it did via an act of violence.



Through the characters in Cry the Beloved Country & particularly that of Stephen Kumalo, I felt that I could sense the hardscrabble landscape of Ndotsheni & somehow comprehend the complexity of the lives of those who call it home. For that reason & simply because in rereading the novel, I have experienced a renewal of hope for a long-troubled part of the world & mankind in general, I have upgraded by rating to a full 5*s.

I highly recommend Alan Paton's novel, which in Lost in the Stars was translated into an operatic setting by Kurt Weill. There have also been two film versions, one in 1951 & more recently in 1995, the latter starring James Earl Jones & Richard Harris, made shortly after the fall of Apartheid & the election of Nelson Mandela.

*Within my review are photo images of: the author, Alan Paton; a sign delineating an Apartheid-restricted space in S. Africa; a landscape in rural Ndotsheni, Natal, S.A.; Richard Harris & James Early Jones in a scene from the film version of the novel. **My Scribner Library version of the book is a 1959 edition paperback for $1.45, actually bound in signature (with pages stitched together with thread), rather rare for a paperback book.