SOURCE: Watson, Stephen. “Cry, the Beloved Country and the Failure of Liberal Vision.” English in Africa 9, no. 1 (May 1982): 29-44.

In the following essay, Watson examines the liberal vision articulated by Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, contending that the novel reveals a tension between Christian liberalism and materialism and that Paton's failure to address these ideological conflicts weakens the work and dates the author's contribution to anti-apartheid literature.

In any discussion of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) it is important to note that the writer grew up in an era before South African racial politics had hardened into their present intransigence. As J. F. Cronin has written:

Paton was born in 1903. He was, thus, already in his mid-forties when the Nationalist Party under Malan ousted Smuts in the General Election of 1948 to establish the first Afrikaner government of South Africa and inaugurated the present régime. It...