Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Author:Alan Paton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

After breakfast, Jarvis returned to his host’s study, and began to read his son’s manuscript. He turned first to the last page of it, and read with pain the last unfinished paragraph. This was almost the last thing that his son had done. When this was done he had been alive. Then at this moment, at this very word that hung in the air, he had got up and gone down the stairs to his death. If one could have cried then, don’t go down! If one could have cried, stop, there is danger! But there was no one to cry. No one knew then what so many knew now. But these thoughts were unprofitable; it was not his habit to dwell on what might have been but what could never be. There was no point in imagining that if one had been there, one could have prevented a thing that had happened only because it had not been prevented. It was the pain that did that, that compelled one to these unprofitable thoughts. He wanted to understand his son, not to desire what was no more accessible to desire. So he compelled himself to read the last paragraph slowly - with his head, not his heart, so that he could understand it.

The truth is that our Christian civilization is riddled through and through with dilemma. We believe in the brotherhood of man, but we do not want it in South Africa. We believe that God endows men with diverse gifts, and that human life depends for its fullness on their employment and enjoyment, but we are afraid to explore this belief too deeply. We believe in help for the underdog, but we want him to stay under. And we are therefore compelled, in order to preserve our belief that we are Christian, to ascribe to Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, our own human intentions, and to say that because He created white and black, He gives the Divine Approval to any human action that is designed to keep black men from advancement. We go so far as to credit Almighty God with having created black men to hew wood and draw water for white men. We go so far as to assume that He blesses any action that is designed to prevent black men from the full employment of the gifts He gave them. Alongside of these very arguments we use others totally inconsistent, so that the accusation of repression may be refuted. We say we withhold education because the black child has not the intelligence to profit by it; we withhold opportunity to develop gifts because black people have no gifts; we justify our action by saying that it took us thousands of years to achieve our own advancement, and it would be foolish to suppose that it will take the black man any lesser time, and that therefore there is no need for hurry. We shift our ground again when a black man does achieve

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