Cry, The Beloved Country

By Alan Paton
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(1996)

Few stories illustrate the gritty realism of the search for reconciliation better than Alan Paton’s novel portraying a Zulu pastor and his family in a beautiful land torn apart by racial injustice. This heart-wrenching account played a part in what was called “the South African miracle.”

Although the story is set in South Africa, it strikes universal themes: the journey to reconciliation, the challenge of racial understanding, the fellowship of suffering, the miracle of forgiveness, and the relationship of victim and offender, father and son, families and communities. These issues are conveyed especially well through the vehicle of fiction.

Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart. Alan Paton

Category: Readings (No. 15)