Alan Paton Biography and List of Works

South African writer, founder, and president of the Liberal Party (1953-68), which opposed apartheid and offered a non-racial alternative to government policy. The Prohibition of Political Interference Bill banned the party in 1968, and the racist government harassed Paton. On the other hand antiapartheid activists considered Paton's gentle Christian-liberal solution to the problems of South Africa hopelessly inadequate. His friendship with the conservative Zulu leader Buthulezi, and his opposition to international sanctions, was also criticized.

Alan Paton was born in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, in the east of South Africa. Neither of his parents was highly educated, but Paton found the magic of literature at an early age, reading such writers as Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Rupert Brooke. He also read the Bible, and his parent's Christian faith and Old Testament values deeply influenced his writing. From his early childhood Paton witnessed the increase of white power at the expense of the black majority.

After studying at the University of Natal, Paton worked as a teacher in Ixopo High School from 1924 to 1935. In 1935 he was appointed Principal of the Diepkloof Reformatory for young offenders, where he introduced controversial progressive reforms. In Ixopo Paton fell in love with Dorrie Francis Lusted, who was married. After her husband died, Paton and Dorrie married in 1928. She died in 1967 and in 1969 Paton married his secretary, Anne Hopkins.

In 1947 Paton went on a tour of reformatories in Britain, the Continent and in North America. It was while on his travels that Paton began writing his first and his best-known novel, CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY (1948). It depicts the collective guilt and friendship engendered by racial prejudices, in the story of a black South African. Stephen Kumalo, an aging Zulu minister, travels from his tribal village to Johannesburg, where he finds that his only son, Absalom, has murdered the only son of a white man, James Jarvis. The tragedy connects these two men, and later they begin to work together.

When the book was first published, it was regarded by many white South Africans as either sentimental or almost revolutionary. The linguistic errors in the translation from the Zulu language aroused criticism. In the decades of open militancy from the 1970s, those black readers who were involved in the political struggle, doubted Paton's political views, and biblical references. In the United States the novel has always been widely appreciated, more than in any other country except South Africa.

"And if I write it down, people may know that he was two men, and that one was brave and gentle; and they may know, when they judge and condemn, that this one struggled with himself in darkness and alone, calling on his God and on the Lord Jesus Christ to have mercy on him. Therefore when the other Pieter van Vlaanderen did not entreat, this one entreated; and when the other did not repent, this one repented; and because there is no such magic, this one, the brave and gentle, was destroyed with him."
(from Too Late Phalarope)

Paton's next international success was TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE (1953), which informed the tragedy of Afrikaner racial and political inflexibility with a sense of Greek tragedy. The protagonist is a white policeman, who enters into an exploitative liaison with a young black girl. Their fate relates the effect of the National Party's obsession with racial purity - the South African Immorality Act explicitly prohibited sexual relations between the races. Paton's short stories, TALES FROM A TROUBLED LAND (1961), and the novel AH, BUT YOUR LAND IS BEAUTIFUL (1981) also dealt with the racial theme.

In the early 1950s Paton began to devote himself fully to the newly formed Liberal Party, which was disbanded in May 1968.Eight years earlier Paton's passport was confiscated on his return from New York, where he had been presented with the annual Freedom Award.

Paton's other books include biographies, a study of the cabinet minister Jan Hofmeyr, and archbishop Geoffrey Clayton. FOR YOUR DEPARTED (1969) was an intimate memoir of the life he shared with his wife. Paton published two autobiographies, TOWARDS THE MOUNTAIN (1980) and JOURNEY CONTINUED (1988). The second volume, completed before his death, begins in 1948 and ends in 1968. Paton died on April 12, 1988, in his home near Durban, Natal.

"Cry, the Beloved Country, however, is also a monument to the future. One of South Africa's leading humanists, Alan Paton, vividly captured his eloquent faith in the essential goodness of people in his epic work."
- Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa

For further reading: Books with the Man behind Them by Edmund Fuller (1962); Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country" by Sheridan Baker (1968); Alan Paton: A Bibliography by Bea Lentel (1969); Alan Paton by Edward Callan (1982); "Cry, the Beloved Country": A Novel of South Africa by Edward Callan (1991); Alan Paton by Peter Alexander (1994); Alan Paton: A Biography by Peter F. Alexander (1994); Post-Colonial African Writers, ed. by Pushipa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998)

CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY, (1948)