Cry The Beloved Country
The novel Cry, the Beloved Country contains many different themes, including fear, reconciliation, hope, anger and personal responsibility. However, the theme that best shapes the novel is social breakdown and racial injustice in the community. One of the novel's messages is that "inequality in human rights, living conditions, and personal empowerment based on racial or ethnic differences are unjust and ultimately intolerable (Putnam 1). The novel accurately points out the racial and social injustice between the white farm owners and black workers, which in turn leads to the social breakdown of the community. The society depicted in the novel is a very unjust one, often times divided on racial lines. The white people that came to South Africa
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When the blacks moved to Johannesburg, they rarely found work, and if they did, the wages were almost always insubstantial. The social breakdown began when the natives started trying to make money illegitimately, either by theft, extortion, or prostitution. "The reason for the increase in crime rates among blacks was due to the poor living conditions and the breaking of the tribe by the white man" (Kramer, pg 4). Two examples of a person getting into trouble in Johannesburg are Absalom and Gertrude Kumalo. Absalom went in search of honest labor, but gave in to the temptations of making easy money by means of robbery and other crime. Gertrude on the other hand, went to the big city to find her husband, but ended up trying to raise her son alone by bootlegging liquor and selling her body for sex. The best example of social breakdown is near the end of the novel, when Absalom shoots and kills a man during a robbery. This quote from the novel best summarizes the reason for social breakdown: "The old tribal system was a moral system. Our natives today produce criminals and prostitutes and drunkards not because it is their nature to do so, but because their simple system of order and tradition and convention has been destroyed. It was destroyed by the impact of our own civilization. Our civilization has therefore an inescapable duty to set up another system of order and tradition and convention" (Chapter
When the blacks moved to Johannesburg, they rarely found work, and if they did, the wages were almost always insubstantial. The social breakdown began when the natives started trying to make money illegitimately, either by theft, extortion, or prostitution. "The reason for the increase in crime rates among blacks was due to the poor living conditions and the breaking of the tribe by the white man" (Kramer, pg 4). Two examples of a person getting into trouble in Johannesburg are Absalom and Gertrude Kumalo. Absalom went in search of honest labor, but gave in to the temptations of making easy money by means of robbery and other crime. Gertrude on the other hand, went to the big city to find her husband, but ended up trying to raise her son alone by bootlegging liquor and selling her body for sex. The best example of social breakdown is near the end of the novel, when Absalom shoots and kills a man during a robbery. This quote from the novel best summarizes the reason for social breakdown: "The old tribal system was a moral system. Our natives today produce criminals and prostitutes and drunkards not because it is their nature to do so, but because their simple system of order and tradition and convention has been destroyed. It was destroyed by the impact of our own civilization. Our civilization has therefore an inescapable duty to set up another system of order and tradition and convention" (Chapter