Cry, the Beloved Country

Chapter 1

In the hilly South African province of Natal, a lovely road winds its way up from the village of Ixopo to Carisbrooke, a journey of seven miles. This misty vantage point looks out over one of the fairest valleys of Africa, where the native birds sing and the grass is dense and green. The lush grass of the hills clings to the rain and mist, soaking up the moisture, which in turn feeds every stream. Although cattle graze here, their feeding has not destroyed the land, and the few fires that burn have not harmed the soil. As the hills roll down to the valley below, however, they become red and bare. The grass there has been destroyed by cattle and fire, and the streams have all run dry. When storms come, the red dirt runs like blood, and the crops are withered and puny. These valleys are the homes of the elderly, who scrape at the dirt for sustenance. Some mothers live here with their children, but all the able-bodied young people have long since moved away.

Alan Paton begins Cry, the Beloved Country with a description of the land surrounding Ixopo, the village where the protagonist Stephen Kumalo lives. Paton establishes this as a rural and isolated area, which is significant to develop the character of Kumalo and his relationship to the larger urban area of Johannesburg where he will soon find himself. In chapter 1, the author considers the survival of the soil not less important than the survival of the human race, relating the life and health of the country to the health of its inhabitants.

The sharp contrasts in the landscape also underscore the unfairness and self-destructiveness of a segregated society. Although the first chapters of the novel do not make it explicit, the ugliness of the land is a result of the segregation policy pursued by the white rulers. White farms are symbolically located at the tops of the hills, where the land is green and fruitful. Black South Africans, however, are forced to tend their settlements at the bottom of the hills, in the unforgiving land of the valley..In some parts, the land is not so beautiful. It has been damaged by over-grazing and poor farming techniques. Lacking education and restricted to limited plots of land, the villagers of Ndotsheni injure the land because they have not been taught to protect it. Overcrowding leads to overgrazing and over-farming, a vicious cycle that lessens the land’s productivity each year.