Cry, The Beloved Country
Cry, The Beloved Country, by Alan Paton, 1946, Audiobook narrated by Michael York, 2012, Blackstone Audio, Inc.
This book, first published in 1948, is about a Black priest in a rural area of South Africa who suffers greatly under the oppression imposed by the minority white rule. His son and sister have to leave their rural village to find work in Johannesburg where they find nothing but trouble. The priest travels to Johannesburg in 1946 to find them and bring them home, but what he finds is that their lives have met with disaster.
The formal system of apartheid was imposed starting in 1948 but the effects of racial discrimination were present much earlier than when the many legal restrictions of apartheid were enacted. Paton does a masterful job of capturing the impacts of poverty in South Africa and the relationships between individuals of the Black and White races. He highlights that, while the majority of white South Africans subscribed to the tenants of white superiority, there were white individuals who did not support these views and worked to improve the lives of the Blacks.
The book is a bit slow, particularly in the beginning, but the author’s rendering of the characters and the times is memorable. It is definitely a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the hisotry and culture of South Africa.
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