General Analysis 

        As Kumalo travels from his native district to Johannesburg, there is also a significant change in the speech patterns. The native Zulu names are replaced with Afrikaner names. New names and new experiences will now confront the simple Kumalo. The reader, therefore, should note each new experience.

         Kumalo’s inability to understand his surroundings shows that his visit to Johannesburg is a changing and learning experience for him. From the train window, everything is immediately and overwhelmingly different: the dominant language is now Afrikaans (a Dutch-based language spoken by the original white immigrants to South Africa), and the black Africans are from different tribes. The shared points of reference that characterize village life are gone—when a man on the train likens the height of the buildings in Johannesburg to a hill behind his father’s home, Kumalo does not know what he is talking about. Even familiar sights and sounds appear to be corrupted.

          Kumalo faces the great fear. For the black priest this is “the fear of a man who lives in a world not made for him, whose own world is slipping away, dying, being destroyed, beyond any recall” . This introduces the theme of the ‘broken tribe’, which is identified as the main problem of the black community. It seems that hunger and poverty could be dealt with, if only the old tribal structures, which kept the community together, would still exist.

          Kumalo is faced with the primary task of trying to bring his personal family back together. There can be no tribal unit until the basic family unit is restored. Consequently, there runs throughout the novel an analogy between the breaking up of the greater society in contrast to Kumalo's attempts to restore his own family as a unit.

         In chapter 5, Msimangu states directly the central problem of the entire novel. Msimangu explains to Kumalo what he believes has gone wrong with their country: the tribal bonds have been broken, giving young men and women no reason to stay in their villages. These youths then go to Johannesburg, where they inevitably lose their way and become morally corrupt. Msimangu is very explicit about the cause-and-effect relationship that he perceives between the deterioration of black culture and crime against whites. As such, he expresses the novel’s central preoccupation with the matter of tribal structure and its important role in holding the country’s black population together. The tragedy is that the black man exists between two worlds: Because the white man has broken the old world of the tribes, which cannot be mended and at the same time, neither the white man nor the black man has found anything to replace the lost, old world.