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THE TITIHOYA CRIES AT DAWN (a comment on Alan Paton’s South African novel Cry, The Beloved Country)
"All roads lead to Johannesburg."(1) So does the railway that runs from Sundsvall via Östersund and the frontier mountains between Sweden and Norway until it reaches the beautiful fjord of Trondheim. The train with the 43-year-old South African on board arrived in the Norwegian city at four in the afternoon on September 25 1946. Two hours later, Alan Paton, while dreaming about his homeland wrote these words:(2) There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbroke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Imzimkolo, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand. (3) To anybody who has made the same journey from Sundsvall to Trondhem as Alan Paton did, there is no doubt: the opening words of his first novel Cry, The Beloved Country must have been inspired by the marvellous views of Jämtland and Tröndelag. Roads and dreams are extraordinary important in this South African tragedy. A tragedy it is, but not without hope and not deprived of beautiful dreams.
Emancipatory dreams Alan Paton was a prophet who cried out to the world a vivid protest against inequity, degradation of human values and racial oppression. A titihoya crying in a beautiful country at dawn of the apartheid era. It has been said about this novel that it "awoke the world to the conditions of life for non-whites in South Africa."(4) Nearly two decades later another prophet on a continent far away from Africa cried out to the world his objection to racial oppressions and inequality. In a famous speech before 250.000 demonstrators in Washington 1963 Martin Luther King declared: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by content of their character. I have a dream today! (5) Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize one year after his classic declaration that revealed his dreams to the world. Alan Paton did not receive the same honour. Is it possible that the black American Baptist pastor had received some inspiration from the white South African Anglican author? That, we do not know. But we do know that they shared the same dream and vision of freedom and brotherhood. Roads of goodness and forgiveness If there are dreams about a beutiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness. To quote the president Nelson Mandela: 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. A goodness that helped manage this small miracle of our transition, and arrested attempts by the disciples to turn our country into a wasteland. (6) The main character of the novel, Stephen Kumalo, is an old Anglican priest whose life is defined by sorrows and tragedies. His sister Getrude and his son Absalom both leave their village for a tragic life in Johannesburg where she becomes a prostitute and he ends his life condemned to death by hanging declared guilty of manslaughter. Despite all cruelties and tragedies on his road to find and to save the members of his family, the old pastor maintains an outstanding goodness. Goodness is closely connected to forgiveness and both these characters describe the relation between the two mourning fathers in the story: the rich landowner Mr Jarvis whose son has been shot down in his house and the poor Reverend Kumalo whose son had fired the gun. Should not the process of reconciliation have been arrested when the white protagonist for human rights was assassinated by the black gangster? Another and even more current question could be asked: Would it not have been natural that the apartheid treatment of the political prisoner Nelson Mandela had created a climate og bitterness and hatred for a longlasting period in South Africa? Stephen Kumalo’s colleague Reverend Msimangu declared: "I have this great fear in my heart that one day when the white man turns to loving he will find we are turned to hating..." (7) Alan Paton’s voice became silent in April 1988, less than two years before the liberation of Nelson Mandela. He died of throat cancer. Is the ongoing reconciliation process in some way a heritage from the Cry that was heard 42 years earlier? Is Paton’s dream about a beautiful and lovely South Africa with true brotherhood between whites and blacks on its road to fulfilment? The novel closes at dawn, a dawn that means the death of Kumalo’s son, but at the same time it is a prophecy about a new South Africa, a "Rainbow nation that has come to peace with itself" (8), created by the beauty of different colours in harmony. Yes, it i the dawn that has come. The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Angeli and East Griqualand.The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotshemi is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret. (9)
Footnotes 1 Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country, 1987, pages 12 and 48 2 Alan Paton, Hymn till en älskad, 1970, (Swedish edition of Kontaktion For You Departed, 1969), p 83 3 Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country, 1987, p 7 4 Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country, 1987, the editors foreword 5 Martin Luther King Jr: "I have a dream", speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 in the March on Washington D.C. for Civil Rights 6 Internet, http://www.obs-us.com/obs/english/films/mx/cry/speech4m.htm (Nelson Mandela commenting on the film Cry, the beloved Country based on Alan Paton’s novel 7 Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country, 1987, p 38 8 Expression from the speech of Nelson Mandela when he was installed as president on the 10th May 1994 9 Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country, 1987 p 236, the closing words of the novel |