I feel pretty dumb about this now, but I didn't realize Alan Paton was white until I googled him some chapters into my reading of Cry, the Beloved Country. I had a longish list of South African books I was considering -- titles by J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Foreigner, and Athol Fugard (whom I had also assumed was black for quite some time) -- and I thought to myself, maybe I should not choose a book by a white author to represent South Africa. Then I found a copy of Cry, the Beloved Country at a thrift store, and I thought, "perfect!" Joke was on me! At the same time, I had in the back of my head some faint memory of critiques I'd heard of the book. I couldn't remember any specifics, but having read the book now I can imagine what they were. (A certain elevation of Christian morals, a dose of "white man's burden" thinking, and just a general disposition toward conciliation, mainly.)
It's hard to read this book, nearly 70 years after it was originally published, and not reflect on the fact that the apartheid state in South Africa only strengthened in the decades following its publication. The book is hopeful, and you would like to believe that people would behave and come to mutual understanding in the face of tragedy, the way they did in the book, but history tells us this was not so. At the same time, this was published in 1948, at a time when European colonialism was firmly in place throughout Africa, and gave voice to some of its ill effects, bringing these to an audience that may not have been attentive to them before. It's hard to imagine what the book meant in its time.
