Introduction
Cry, the beloved country is a novel that was written by Alan Paton in the year 1948. This book is a very famous novel in the history of South Africa and it turned out to be the worldwide bestseller just after it was published. The novel is about a country of the black man who is under the law of the white man. The book presents a Zulu pastor by the name of Stephen Kumalo and also presents the son to this pastor and the son is called Absalom. These people are set against a setting of land and a people faced by racial discrimination. This paper is going to look at why the native Africans move to the city and what happens to them and those left behind in villages. The paper will also look at the issue of the break up of the tribal system.
Why Native Africans are moving to Johannesburg
In this novel, the young energetic people move to the city to look for work that is not available in the villages they were born. In most cases, they go to work in the goldmine for the white man. Cities like Johannesburg depend heavily on the labor provided by black people. These people who go to the cities go to work for subsistence pay, they work under poor conditions, and they in turn engage in much crime. This is indicated in the life Absalom and Gedrudge engage in.
When Absalom gets to the city, he engages in the life of crime by carrying out burglary which gets him to prison. On the other hand, Gertrude at the time she goes to look for her husband and fails to meet him engages in selling illegal beer and also becomes a prostitute.
Most of the people who were left behind in the villages were the old people and the young children. These people encountered difficulties in carrying out activities that could enable them to survive comfortably such as food farming. The children that were left behind with the old people experienced starvation because there was not enough food for them to feed on. In the novel, at the point where Stephen Kumalo takes an initiative to go and look for his son Absalom, his brother John and his sister Gertrude, he refuses to use the little money they had saved for the school fees of Absalom but the wife reminds Mr. Kumalo that those people who go to the city never return “Absalom will never go to St. Chad’s. He is in Johannesburg. When people go to Johannesburg, they never come back”[1].
Break up of the tribal system
The society that is shown in this novel is an unjust society. It is a society that is divided on racial grounds. The white people have snatched much of the land that is profitable from the black people. This has caused the black people to move away from the villages to go and work for the white people in the cities breaking away from their tribes. Following the meager income from the labor, these black people engage in crime. In the novel, Misimangu makes an explanation to Kumalo about the situation. He emphasizes that there has been breaking of the tribe by the white man. Misimangu has a strong belief that this is the reason why young black people are always found on the wrong side of the law. He goes ahead to explain concerning the white man that “but it has not suited him to build something in place of what is broken”[2].
This point is as well stressed by Arthur Jarvis where he stresses that the old system was a moral system. He points out that the natives at that time produced criminals as well as prostitutes and even drunkards. This is not for the reason that this is done because it is their nature but it is for the reason that there has been the destruction of the simple system they had been having of order and tradition. This destruction is believed by Arthur Jarvis as being brought in by the civilization they acquired as the natives. This civilization, therefore, brought the inevitable duty of building up a new system of order, convention, and tradition.
This is a great tragedy that has brought affliction to a country. The affliction is seen in the blacks being exploited by the white people and this has consequently brought in a complete deviation from the normal way of life. Tribal breaking can be best seen in the cases of Absalom and Gertrude where they encounter their respective fates. Gertrude goes to look for her husband who had gone but she never returns. Absalom in turn goes to look for them and he does not return. This is an experience that is repeated over and over again by the relatives of those people who travel to Johannesburg. The members of the family take an initiative to go to the big city but unfortunately, they do not return. Neither do these people take a step to alert those whom they left behind about their whereabouts by way of writing to them. It is just like the entire family has been lost, absorbed into the unknown city life. To stop tribal break up, the system should be changed, and especially to find a way of preventing the people to go to the city by making the villages favorable places to stay.
Conclusion
In the novel, there is an indication that the author has a realization that the problems society of South Africa was facing stemmed from the consequences of colonization, the snatching of the land, and the exploitation of unskilled black labor.
Among the major problems resulting from this is the native communities experiencing spiritual as well as moral disorientation and these are referred to by the author as the “broken tribe”. There is an indication from the book that the black natives get very much lost when they go to the city and leave their original homes. It is therefore for the good of the native communities to remain where they were born than to move to the cities in order for them to stays together to minimize the problems they encounter in the city.
Relating this to what occurred in the course of apartheid, this opinion offers support to what in the times that followed what was referred to as separate development. At the time the Native Africans were pushed to go to their homelands, the claim behind this was that these Africans would have an opportunity to carry on with life together and in turn be able to have self-governance.
References
Paton, Alan. Cry, the beloved country. Scribner, 1950