Not too long ago, NPR had a program on "books that helped us grow up." While the ones mentioned reflect some of the more YA-themed titles my generation read, my librarian mother brought home a much wider variety of books for me which I voraciously devoured, sometimes staying up most of the night to finish whatever volume I was reading.
One of those books was probably a little unusual to give to a 12-year-old, namely Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. For a child living in a rural part of the country which was 99.99% whitebread without even so much as an ethnic restaurant around for 20 miles, such a book was a revelation. Apartheid? Didn't know it existed prior, let alone how to pronounce it. However, it wasn't only the racial themes which made such an impression, it was how well Paton portrayed the classism and elitism of South Africa after the end of British imperialism, and how human compassion can triumph even in the face of the often hopelessness of existence.
Cry the Beloved Country is a multi-faced book, but at the heart of it is the unraveling of the traditional customs of a society set against the background of two grieving fathers: a Zulu pastor, whose son has been arrested for murder and faces execution, and the white father of the victim, who begins to realize the role South African whites often play in such crimes. Paton crafted a literary sermon of sorts against the practices that would turn into apartheid in South Africa in a prescient way, since the novel was published in 1948 and apartheid became law later that very same year. The title of the book is taken from the following passage uttered by the omniscient narrator:
"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 his 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."
Alan Paton wrote the novel while he was principal at the Diepkloof Reformatory for delinquent African boys. One interesting note is the process surrounding the book's creation, quite different from today as seen by the author's description of the events leading up to publication:
"The book was begun in Trondheim and finished in San Francisco [on Christmas Eve]. It was written in Norway, Sweden, England and the United States....I had less than a week to spend in New York before sailing to South Africa. I air-mailed the manuscript on a Tuesday, but owing to snowstorms no planes flew. The package went by train, broke open and had to be rewrapped, and finally reached an intermediate Post Office on the Sunday, three days before I was due in New York. My friends traced this package to this intermediate Post Office, and had the office opened and the package delivered, by what means I do not know. In the meantime they had friends standing by to do the typing, and they worked night and day, with the result that the first seventeen chapters arrived at the house of Scribner's on Wednesday, a few minutes before myself...."
Two movies have been based on the book, a film version in 1951 with Canada Lee, Charles Carson, and Sidney Poitier, and another in 1995 with James Earl Jones and Richard Harris. Neither version did particularly well at the box office, but the book itself sold over 15 million copies worldwide before Paton's death in 1995, and was critically well-received except in South Africa—where it was banned as propaganda.