Alan Stewart Paton (1903 - 1988) was a South African writer and anti-apartheid activist. A white South African of British descent, Alan Paton wrote what is considered one of the great African novels in English.
Through his writings and political work, Paton both foresaw and helped to effect fundamental changes in the shape of South African society.
Early Life and Education
Alan Paton was born in Pietermaritzburg in the Colony of Natal (now South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province) on January 11, 1903. His father, James Paton, was a stern authoritarian from Scotland, and his mother, Eunice Paton, a mild schoolteacher of British ancestry.
The family was of the Christadelphian faith, which Alan would leave as a young man. His mother was a teacher and his father was a civil servant, and after growing up in Pietermaritzburg he attended the University of Natal. A good student, Alan attended the Berg St. Girls School, a coeducational facility, and accelerated quickly.
In 1914, Paton earned a scholarship to attend Maritzburg College, one of South Africa’s oldest schools. He graduated at the age of fifteen with many prizes and honors. In 1919 Paton entered Natal University College on an Education Department bursary to become a science teacher.
Read also: Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority
While there, he published poems in the Natal Witness and the campus magazine, acted in plays, began a novel, and was active in the debating society. Though short of stature he never grew taller than five feet seven inches his pale blue eyes and straight brown hair made him a fairly attractive man.
While at the university, Paton abandoned Christadelphianism, thus distancing himself from his family. He became president of the Students Representative Council and in July, 1924, was their delegate to an Imperial Conference in England.
It was his first trip abroad, and it opened his eyes to how other nations regarded his country’s treatment of Africans, Indians, and other nonwhites.
Early Career and Social Work
In 1925, fresh out of the university, Paton had great ambition but no clear path. He took his first position as a teacher in Ixopo, a village southwest of Pietermaritzburg. In 1928, Paton accepted a post teaching at his alma mater, Maritzburg College.
He joined a Christian men’s organization, which focused on community and social service. Paton soon became a senior administrator and remained active with the organization through much of his life.
Read also: Discover Thula Thula
In 1930, Paton enrolled for a master’s degree at Natal University College and joined the South African Institute of Race Relations, a small group of liberal thinkers addressing issues of race in the nation. His awareness of the injustices of South African society was growing steadily.
Paton taught school for a decade, then switched careers in 1935 to head Johannesburg’s Diepkloof Reformatory, home to 650 black youths who had been labeled “delinquent” by the authorities. As principal he liberalized the reformatory’s regulations, giving inmates greater freedom and respect.
Under Paton’s leadership, Diepkloof saw a great drop in the rate of escapes and the successful implementation of many innovative techniques. Paton wrote little at Diepkloof but gathered mental prototypes for characters that would later appear in his fiction.
His interest in social work stemmed in part from his conversion to the Anglican faith and his growing interest in racial justice.
Cry, the Beloved Country
In 1946, Paton began to foresee the end of his tenure at Diepkloof. He traveled on sabbatical to visit prisons in Britain, Sweden, Norway, and the United States. Paton completed the novel during his travels.
Read also: Traditional South African Bread
When his first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, was published in 1948, the reviews hailed it as “beautiful and profoundly moving . . .". The novel deals with a Zulu pastor, his son, and the ambitions and crimes that engulf them on their separate journeys from rural Ixopo to the great city of Johannesburg.
While in the United States in 1947, friends referred his manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, a prestigious publishing house, and he returned to South Africa with a book deal. Cry, the Beloved Country was published in the United States on February 1, 1948, and subsequently in England and South Africa.
Its reception was better than Paton or his publishers could have imagined. Paton was hailed for his astounding insights, his melodious prose, and his compelling story.
The book’s protagonist is Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu priest who travels to Johannesburg from the countryside in search of his sister and his son. When he arrives, he discovers that his sister has been forced into prostitution and his son has fled after being involved in the murder of a white man.
Publication of the book coincided with the 1948 electoral victory of the white Afrikaner-based National Party that entrenched segregating laws known as apartheid. Cry, the Beloved Country has been translated into 20 languages and has sold 15 million copies.
It was adapted into a 1949 play, Lost in the Stars (with songs by the composer Kurt Weill), and filmed in 1951 and with James Earl Jones as Kumalo in 1995.
Income from the novel made him relatively rich. He decided to focus on writing, but a second novel was not immediately forthcoming. Over the next few years, Cry, the Beloved Country was adapted for both stage and screen. Paton traveled and spoke widely and continued his work with various organizations.
"Cry the beloved country" Novel summary and analysis
Political Activism
Paton, who eventually left his job to write full time, also became a political activist. In 1953 he helped found the Liberal Party, of which he was the first president. The party, which advocated universal voting rights and nonviolence, was banned in 1968 when the South African government prohibited all multiracial parties.
Angered by the injustice and idiocy of these laws, Paton turned to political activism. He helped to form and then assumed leadership roles in the Liberal Party, the only multiracial party in the country, devoting heart and soul to it for the next fifteen years.
While never running for office himself, Paton was a ubiquitous spokesperson for the cause. He met with many key public figures, including Albert Lutuli of the African National Congress and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of the United States.
For most of the 1960s Paton was forbidden to leave the country, but he continued to write, producing a second novel, seven works of nonfiction, and a play.
Always a moderate, Paton opposed violent means for political ends. He was hounded by the police, arrested and fined for political organizing in 1957, and deprived of his passport in 1960.
Nevertheless, he spoke out for a unified society and worked with such groups as the Defence and Aid Fund to channel international financial support to liberal causes.
Later Life and Death
By 1963, Paton was gray-haired and slump-shouldered. Violent resistance was becoming more common, and the middle road advocated by Paton and the Liberal Party seemed to satisfy neither radical Africans nor conciliatory white people. Paton continued to travel and lecture as much as he could but was losing hope that the changes he envisioned would happen within his lifetime.
In 1967, after a long battle with lung disease, Paton’s wife Dorrie passed away. During the course of his later life, Paton earned honorary doctorates in literature and divinity from twelve universities, including Yale, Michigan, and Edinburgh.
He won many awards, including the American Freedom Award and The Sunday Times Book Award for Cry, the Beloved Country.
In 1974 Paton began his autobiography. That same year, he unexpectedly started another novel, a historical narrative of South Africa in the 1950’s. (1981), the first of a projected trilogy, met mixed reviews, and Paton never wrote the sequels.
His health began to fail him, and his pace slowed as he entered his ninth decade. Save the Beloved Country, a collection of lectures and writings, was published in 1987.
In March of 1988, a tumor was discovered in Paton’s esophagus. After an unsuccessful operation, he developed pneumonia. Paton died at his home on April 12, 1988, at the age of eighty-five.
Paton, 85, died of cancer at his home in Botha's Hill near Durban in eastcoast Natal provincea. 'When one has spent 84 years as a workaholic one is entitled to become a dropout. Eighty-four years of slavery is quite enough.
The writer, political philosopher and outspoken critic of the white government's racial policies was taken to his home from a Durban hospital late Monday. 'It was something that made him very happy,' Mrs. Surgeons found a tumor on Paton's esophagus when he was admitte.
The Roman Catholic archbishop of Durban, Denis Hurley, a friend of 25 years, said, 'I will remember Alan as a man of very deep religious faith with a broad human vision inspired by his faith. 'No doubt those more radical than him be critical (because) he never went as far as they did.
, appeared posthumously later that same year.
Alan Paton's Legacy
Throughout his life, Alan Paton wrote and spoke of the inevitable dissolution of the system of apartheid. With the wealth received from his writings, Paton funded many projects and initiatives, and independently sponsored the welfare and education of many young Africans. He was also known to be a captivating speaker.
Though Paton himself never saw the dismantling of apartheid, his books served as agents for social change. Cry, the Beloved Country sold more than fifteen million copies in twenty languages by the time of his death; along with Too Late the Phalarope, it movingly informed readers around the world about the plight of South Africa’s ethnic majorities and thus fueled the international sentiment that eventually helped to transform South African society.
Alan Paton was the man who pulled up the barbed wire fence and planted geraniums in South Africa. As a chronicler of his times, he brought America and the rest of the world face-to-face and heart-to-heart with the problem of race relations in South Africa.
Selected Works by Alan Paton
| Title | Year |
|---|---|
| Cry, the Beloved Country | 1948 |
| Too Late the Phalarope | 1953 |
| Ah, but Your Land is Beautiful | 1981 |
| Tales From a Troubled Land | 1961 |
| Hofmeyr | 1964 |
