Cry, the Beloved Country (Plot Summary)

Plot Summary

Book I

Cry, the Beloved Country consists of three sections, Books I, II, and III, each presenting a different point of view about the same events. Book I is presented through the eyes of the main character, Stephen Kumalo, a native priest in Ndotsheni, a small community in the Ixopo district of South Africa. The time is 1947. There is a terrible drought that is forcing the young people of the region to leave their agricultural communities and to emigrate to Johannesburg to seek employment in the mines. The loss of so many young people has undermined the tribal traditions, which cannot be maintained in a large urban setting like Johannesburg. The action begins with a letter that comes to Kumalo from Johannesburg, telling him that his sister, Gertrude Kumalo, is ill and needs his help. Kumalo consults with his wife and decides to use their meagre savings to go to the big city to help his sister. His son, Absalom, has also disappeared into the city, and Kumalo hopes to gain word of him as well.

After a long and intimidating journey by train and bus to Johannesburg, Kumalo visits a parish priest named Theophilus Msimangu who helps him to locate his sister. After a long search from one address to another, Gertrude is found living in a shabby room with a young child. She has been working as a prostitute. Kumalo arranges for her and the child to stay with him before they return to Ndotsheni. Kumalo then goes to visit his brother, John Kumalo, who has become a political leader for black rights in Johannesburg. Kumalo's discussions with his brother illustrate the tension between the tribal culture of the past and the new way of living in the city. In the new way of life everyone is on their own with no community, but also without the limitations of living within the rules of the tribe. John Kumalo praises the opportunities available for enterprising people in the city, but Kumalo suggests that his brother John might have protected their sister Gertrude if he had remembered the values of the tribe.

Kumalo then tries to discover the whereabouts of his son, Absalom. As he goes about Johannesburg with Msimangu as his guide, the terrible conditions of the "kaffirs" (native people) are revealed: the overcrowding, the segregation from the white communities where the natives have to work, the lack of transportation, the rising prices and stagnant wages. In fact, the black people have initiated a bus strike to protest a fare hike, and Kumalo and Msimangu must walk many miles in search of Absalom. Sympathetic white people drive up and down the thoroughfares giving the kaffirs rides in their cars in order to support the strike, and Kumalo is greatly impressed by this generosity. Kumalo's search for his son ends at a reformatory where Absalom had been sent after being convicted of theft. The white man who runs the reformatory has released Absalom early for good behavior and found him a job and a place to live. Absalom has a girlfriend with whom he is expecting a child, and he is to marry her soon. Though Kumalo is distressed that his son has broken the law, he is delighted that Absalom seems to be reformed and on his way to living a regular life. The white man and Msimangu lead Kumalo to Absalom's new home so that father and son can be reunited.

When they arrive at Absalom's home they discover that he has abandoned his pregnant girlfriend and resumed his life of crime. The white man is very disillusioned and angry, but Kumalo is grieved at this new evidence of the destruction brought on by the breaking of the tribe. It is discovered that Absalom has been involved in a terrible crime: he and two companions have broken into the home of a white man, Arthur Jarvis, and killed him when the white man surprised them in the middle of the robbery. The irony is that Arthur Jarvis was an important advocate among white men of native rights and was writing a book about how white mistreatment of blacks was the underlying cause of black crime. The magnitude of the crime and its consequences for his family and the black community weigh heavily on Kumalo's mind.

There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and the mind, whenever one opens the pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He only knows the fear of his heart.

Book I ends as Kumalo visits his son in prison. Absalom is remorseful, but has no explanation for his behavior other than the temptations of the city and bad companionship. Kumalo turns for help to Father Vincent, a white Anglican priest who finds an attorney for Absalom, and helps Kumalo through a crisis of faith.

Book II

Book II is presented from the point of view of James Jarvis, the father of the murdered man. Jarvis lives in Ixopo and has a large estate, High Place, near the village of Ndotsheni where Kumalo is the priest. Jarvis is only vaguely aware of the kaffirs and their community, seeing ignorant, dirty people who exhaust and damage their own land with traditional farming techniques. When the news comes that his only child, Arthur, has been murdered in Johannesburg, Jarvis has the sad task of informing his wife and going to the city to stay with his daughter-in-law's family while the body is identified and the estate settled.

While going through Arthur's papers, Jarvis discovers that his son had a great admiration for Abraham Lincoln and believed that Lincoln had much to teach South Africa about race relations. Since Jarvis knew little of his son's opinions about the conditions of the natives, he makes an effort to understand his son's thinking on the race issue. Jarvis reads the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's second inaugural address, as well as Arthur's writings about the "native question." Jarvis begins to realize that the prejudices he has held against the kaffirs have contributed to the deprivations that natives have suffered in South Africa. He comes to understand that the white ruling class has broken the tribal life of native people by using them as cheap labor in the cities and depriving them of community life by making them live in compounds without their families. Jarvis sees that his son was trying very hard to change the lot of the native majority by giving them a greater share in the benefits and opportunities that the white minority have always enjoyed.

One of Absalom Kumalo's companions in crime is the son of John Kumalo. Though Absalom has determined to tell the truth to the court, John Kumalo advises his son and the other culprit to lie and say they were not there. In spite of the fact that Absalom has the free services of Mr. Carmichael, a white lawyer who defends black clients as a public service, the court condemns Absalom to death by hanging. The two other culprits are acquitted for lack of evidence. Kumalo prepares to return to Ndotsheni to tell his wife the tragic news. When he goes to take Gertrude with him, he finds that she has been lured back into her old life, leaving her son behind. Kumalo returns to his village with the boy and Absalom's pregnant wife. Absalom was permitted to marry her in prison to give their child a name.

Book III

Book III is told from the point of view of both Kumalo and Jarvis, who have returned to their respective homes in Ixopo. Jarvis's grandson, the young son of Arthur Jarvis, makes friends with Kumalo in order to learn to speak Zulu. Because of this relationship, Jarvis learns of the deprivations being suffered in the kaffir village because of the drought. He sends milk to save the dying children, hires an agriculture expert to restore the stricken valley and to teach the people effective farming techniques, and builds a new church in his wife's memory. The two fathers, white and black, become reconciled to one another. Together they represent the hope for South Africa's future.