Plora, pàtria estimada (1948)

Patton paints of picture of South Africa in the late 40s that is balanced and I think more powerful because he lets the details and events speak for themselves. His writing style is clean, sparse. There are no unnecessary literary flourishes or intrusions. It’s a heartbreaking, honest story which has not lost its relevance. ( )

Amazing read. Interesting insight into the South Africa right at the cusp of entering into the age of Apartheid. Capturing the complicated state of people and cultures clashing in an era of rapid change. Beautifully written. ( )

A beautiful, deeply sad book that tells the story of South Africa before Apartheid had a name, but when most of that system was functionally in place, through a few peoples' connected stories.

The writing is a powerful example of how to love a place while despising crucial things about it.

The book does have some weaknesses which I think reflect the author's position of privilege relative to half of the characters. White saviourism creeps in a little in book 3; there aren't really any fully realised female characters; and I think he lets off Anglo South Africa too easily by caricaturing Afrikaners as the sole drivers of Apartheid. It's a mark of Paton's skill as a writer that all of these elements are much less of a drag than in other books like this I've read (notably Snow Falling on Cedars, which is all-but-ruined by the equivalent flaws). It may be the best account a white South African could have written of that moment in time, and now I really want to read a black South African's counterpart. ( )

This is the big daddy of all liberal South African protest novels, the first really high-profile international bestseller to draw attention to the damage done by the racism embedded in the South African system, even before the fiction of "apartheid" was created.

It's a simple, very classically-constructed novel, a tragedy built around a father's quest for his missing son, full of symbolic landscape description and stately, formal conversations, peppered with interpolated sociological observations that come at us from a Marxist-Anglican viewpoint, all of it very much more 1848 than 1948. But somehow that doesn't seem to matter: Paton gets away with it because of his obvious love for the country and the people who live in it and his passionate concern to undo the mess that it is in.

Paton sees the racism that poisons South African life in a straightforward Marxist way, as an ideology that has grown up to justify the need the capitalist system has to keep black people in poverty so that there will always be a pool of unskilled labour prepared to work at low wages to keep the mines and farms going. By taking away the best land and forcing people into inadequate "reserves", the old agricultural economy of the tribal system has been broken down, taking with it the social control and restraints on behaviour of traditional society. Young men have to leave their families to go and work in the cities — the system doesn't allow them to establish stable family homes in the cities, or to build careers or businesses once they are there, so those who are too enterprising or too undisciplined to cope with tedious work in mines and factories are more than likely to end up in crime.

For the moment, political opposition doesn't seem to offer a way out — in the absence of any real political responsibilities open to them, black leaders are vulnerable to being corrupted by the system. Well-meaning white liberals can make a difference on a small local scale, but in the end they are only giving back a part of what their community took away in the first place. The only real pillar of hope for Paton seems to be the (Anglican-) Christian church, which gives black people a new kind of community structure to replace what they have lost in the breakdown of tribal bonds. But he's clearly not expecting the revolution any time soon.

If this were a new book, it would be criticised because Paton is a white person writing from the point of view of a black protagonist, using elements of style that are clearly meant to give the book an African rhythm, but which can sometimes start looking rather Hiawatha-ish: Here is a white man's wonder, a train that has no engine, only an iron cage on its head, taking power from metal ropes stretched out above. Conversations that are supposed to be in Zulu are rendered in very formal, courteous English, which is perhaps an accurate representation of the way social relations in Zulu work, but starts after a while to look like a cliché of old-fashioned exoticising colonial fiction. It's clearly all well-meant, of course, and in the context of its time, we can't really use the "cultural appropriation" argument that Paton is stealing space in which black writers could have been selling their books. If anything, he's helping to create a demand for more African writing.

Of course, Paton wrote this for an international audience, during a stay abroad, and the book must owe a lot of its success to the self-satisfaction American readers got from discovering that there were worse things in the world than their own home-grown racism, and British readers from finding that it wasn't their responsibility any more. The South African authorities, of course, banned it. But Paton did go back home and continued to engage in South African politics, doing his best to swim against the tide and work for change.

Whatever you think of it, it's an engaging tear-jerker and an important document of its time. ( )

The story of a country parson's journey to Johannesburg to find his son is told in the slow, stately rhythms of country life, and perhaps the Zulu language itself. I was moved by the ritual use of language: go well, stay well, yes, I understand, many other repeated phrases that become something of a hymn to the country and the lost culture. The characters are sometimes emblems: the girl, the demonstrator, the boy, the child, all without names. But the characters that are named are very present. The parson's brother John has long since relocated to Johannesburg, and adopted city ways and pace. Gertrude has been totally corrupted by the city after traveling there to find her husband. Jarvis and Parson Kumalo share the countryside and the terrible pain of loss. Msimangu is a loving guide through the inferno of the city, and a truly religious man.

Paton doesn't shy away from the politics and desolation of apartheid, but he shows its effect on behavior, on the way things must be done and must not be done. He makes it very personal, and all his characters sympathetic, no easy task.
And the book is filled with grinding poverty, unspoken fears, poignant hope.

We know now that apartheid has ended, reconcilliation has been attempted, people still live in poverty and separation. Amazingly, there was no war. But the fears between and among groups of different people resurge, and this book bears reading again.