She tells how there were government houses, libraries, departments of Treasury, Banks that were owned by slave traders and the Mill Reef Club that “ declared itself completely private, in order to keep out the natives unless they were servants, on each corner. All that once was Antigua are the reasons why she hates the English. She calls them “pigs that behaved in a bad way”. She is upset because of the mistreatment that her and her people faced from the English, describing the personal experiences natives have had with the racist “so called doctors” that
Stephen Khumalo, being a simple man from the hills of Ndotsheni, is shocked and hurt to find his family's immoral condition in Johannesburg. Seeing as he is a priest from a rural town, he is rarely faced with the bittersweet temptation of sin. Therefore, he cannot understand why his close relatives have succumbed to things such as murder, prostitution, and deceit. His honesty and faith in God till the very end of the book bears witness to the kind of upbringing and lifestyle he has had. “The humble man reached into his pocket for his sacred book, and began to read.
In the beginning of chapter two of Maggie, he leaves nothing to the imagination of their surroundings: children playing in the muck and in the road for vehicles to hit, disgusting people screaming at each other, and in “postures of submission,” and the very building above them looking like it was about to fall. The children of the Johnson household curse and fight and act like animals, and idea reinforce by Crane’s simile relating Maggie to a tigress (Crane 6, 9). This home for these innocent children in Maggie is described as a moral garbage pit, where the ethics that the middle and upper classes held dear did not necessarily apply. Like a malignant cancer, the
He lives a quiet life with his wife in their home, and to their village standards live a middle-class life. Kumalo goes to Johannesburg where he is overwhelmed by the larger city and sets on a mission to find his son Absalom. Kumalo's physical and mental health start to deteriorate on this exhausting journey. One clue leads to another in the whereabouts of Absalom, starting as a factory worker, to a burglar, to being in a reformatory to being a killer. Kumalo is in disbelief of the man who his son has become, the little boy he raised has taken a severe detour in his life down a spiral path.
Ignorance sweeps across the white citizens of South Africa like a plague. It causes them to be blind, and leaves them without a care to see their wrongdoings towards the blacks in their society. They cling to their twisted Christian ideologies, believing one thing and doing the opposite. By using parallelism, diction, and a biblical allusion to portray a series of arguments, Alan Paton conveys his great dislike for the accepted truths of his self-proclaimed Christian South Africans. Through Arthur Jarvis’ letter, Alan Paton paints the picture of a racist society in which those at the top look down upon the ones at the bottom.
However, there is more of a biblical connection than just his faith. St. Stephen, the alleged first sufferer of the Christian religion, was tortured until he died, after wrongly being accused of saying callous words that oppose the Holy Land and the ruling decree. Stephen Kumalo is also a victim of the injustice in society. He is a black man who is trying to fight biasness of the white world in order to find his son
Paton has structured his novel to highlight this passage of his characters and thus that of South Africa. The novel is structured into three books. The first focuses mainly on the journey of the Black country priest, Stephen Kumalo, while the second centers on the white man, James Jarvis. By depicting these two characters separately Paton illustrates how distinct and separate the lives of the two cultures are. But at the same time, through the murder of Arthur Jarvis, an event that affects both men deeply, Paton shows how interlinked the two cultures are, and how reliant they are on each other.
“The tragedy is not things that are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended together.” Alan Paton wrote this novel, Cry the Beloved Country during his tenure as the principal at Diepkloof Reformatory for delinquent African Boys.Alan Paton wrote his important novel, Cry the Beloved Country, while apartheid was still in place in South Africa. On Kumulo’s first journey, he is determined to find his son. As the journey goes on we see Kumulo’s weaknesses show. His journey begins when he receives a letter from a fellow minister summoning him to Johannesburg.
Both Kumasi and the homeland serve to symbolize the refined society of years past. However, soon after the readers are introduced to these rolling hills they also find that a drought and poor farming are turning the land brown. The land’s transition from perfect to corrupt mirrors Kumalo’s perception of people’s ways of life during his visit in Johannesburg. As Kumalo arrives in Johannesburg, he finds that his son is missing and his sister has become a prostitute. These details disturb Kumalo, who then attempts to “save” his family members from the evils of Johannesburg by reminding them of the moral codes of the home
The concept of forgiveness in Cry the Beloved Country is very crucial to the plot because Kumalo has many family members that he needs to forgive before he can leave Ndotsheni and go help them in Johannesburg. When Kumalo’s wife questions him about his well-being he replies angrily, “Hurting myself? Hurting myself? I do not hurt myself, it is they who are hurting me. My own son, my own sister, my own brother.