A father and a son. A land and its people. Cry, the Beloved Country is about both the one and the many. Our story follows Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo, a humble man from a very humble place who travels to the city of Johannesburg to try and find his son Absalom. In the South Africa of the 1940s, the friction between "native" and "white" is a murmur with the volume increasing, terrifying to those both in power and to the natives who know who will truly suffer whenever there is violence. Pastor Kumalo's journey is an emotional one and what he learns and how he processes it is at the crux of this novel. His love of his son and of his people, his introspection and his choices - they are what make this novel so unbelievably beautiful. The writing is exquisite - sparse in some ways but so deep in others. The word choice, the images, it made me feel so much compassion both for the pastor as well as for all the non-Europeans who were trying to eke out a life for themselves in a land that was dying and under the thumb of the white man who claimed that dying land.
I love that there are good and bad choices made by people of both races. Here is humility. Here is compassion and devastation and a love for something bigger than yourself. Here is trying to find peace in a world that does not favor you. It is hard and it is heavy. But it is beautiful, too.
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