Cry The Beloved Country Essay

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Social breakdown follows, because the blacks have been taken away from the traditional social structures that lent stability to their lives. 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.

This would include such things as observation of laws and customs, and respect for elders. It was destroyed by the impact of our own civilisation.

Left rudderless, working for subsistence wages, and enduring poor living conditions, it is not surprising that crime rates among blacks are on the rise. He says that the white man has "broken the tribe." He believes this is why the young people break the law, and he adds, of the white man, "But it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken" (chapter 5). He wrote in one of his manuscripts, "The old tribal system was . Our civilisation has therefore an inescapable duty to set up another system of order and tradition and convention" (Chapter 20).

This is the tragedy that has afflicted the country: the exploitation of blacks by whites and the consequent loss of an entire way of life.

Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country exhibits the effects of living in Johannesburg; though it is a city divided by race, its inhabitants lead parallel lives (Cry, the Beloved Country 33-312).

The lives of the two main characters, Stephen Kumalo...

Blacks are therefore forced to leave their tribal villages, where there is no work, and go to the city.

In cities like Johannesburg, white businesses depend heavily on black labor, for which they pay little.

The House on Mango Street and Cry, the Beloved Country both involve themes emphasizing the home and family.

From the old umfundisi seeking for his prodigal son to Esperanza searching and wanting a place of her own, both of these prolific stories...