Cry, the Beloved Country Study Guide

Alan Paton was born and raised in South Africa. After he completed Natal University, Alan Paton taught school in the village of Ixopo. He began to explore religion, and converted to Anglicanism in 1930. In 1935, he became principal of the Diepkloof Reformatory for delinquent black boys, where he made many successful, progressive reforms to the institution. During a visit of European and American prisons and reformatories, he began to write Cry, the Beloved Country. It was an immediate success upon publication, and sold over 15 million copies during Paton’s lifetime. After the rise of the National Party, Paton became an anti-apartheid activist. He was president of the Liberal Party from 1953 until it was disbanded in 1968 because of new laws directed against interracial political parties. Paton was considered an enemy of the state: the government took his passport away in 1960, and did not restore it for a decade. He died in 1988, before the end of apartheid.

In the same year after the publication of Cry, the Beloved Country, the National Party rose to power in South Africa and implemented racial apartheid, an extreme form of segregation between the wealthy white minority and the poorer, oppressed black majority.

There are many books in the South African canon that deal with apartheid and its effects: July’s People (1981), by Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate Nadine Gordimer, predicted how the system would fall and was banned by the government. Tsotsi (1980) by Athol Fugard, follows a young criminal with no family struggling amidst crushing poverty. Another novel by Alan Paton, Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful (1983), is set during the 1950s and follows a fictional version of his own political activism.