Cry The Beloved World

I may be a minority in my absolute love for Alan Paton's CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY and even if I recognize that the text is slow and dull (especially to the teenagers I taught it to), there is something brilliant and special about the novel. For one, I don't think I'd ever be interested in such writing if it wasn't for my cousin's connection with HOOPS4HOPE and his work in Africa. Yet, my working within urban settings has also helped me to see that there are many parallels with Nelson Mandela's mission and the world Martin Luther King dreamed of.

In Paton's novel, the character Arthur Jarvis (before being murdered accidentally) is a political activist and writer for the rights of black Africans in South Africa. He is a white man. His father, a wealthy landowner in the countryside, uncovers his son’s history only when he arrives to investigate this son’s death. Here, uJarvis learns of a man’s devotion to creating a more just African society. In his son’s journals uJarvis reads:

What we did when we came to South Africa was permissible. It was permissible to develop our great resources with the aid of what labor we could find. But it is not permissible to keep men unskilled for the sake of unskilled work.
It was permissible when we discovered gold to bring labor to the mines. It was permissible to build compounds and to keep women and children away from the towns. It was permissible as an experiment, in the light of what we knew. But in the light of what we know now, with certain exceptions, it is no longer permissible. It is not permissible for us to go destroying family life when we know that we are destroying it…..
…Now society has always, for reasons of self-interest if for no other, educated its children so that they grow up law-abiding, with socialized aims and purposes. There is no other way it can be done. Yet we continue to leave the education of our native urban society to those few Europeans who feel strongly about it, and to deny opportunities and money for its expansion. That is not permissible. For reason of self-interest, alone, it is dangerous….
Our natives today produce criminals and prostitutes and drunkards, not because it is their nature to do so, but because their simple system of order and tradition and conviction has been destroyed. It was destroyed by the impact of our civilization (145-146).

I've tried to express myself in such a way, but have yet to find these words. So, I put them here today to make sense of a novel and framework that makes me happy.