"Cry, The Beloved Country" Discrimination against people who are different can be identify in every country around the world. People of every sex, color, religion, and in this case, ethnicity are tormented. In the 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s apartheid was an emanate injustice throughout the land of South Africa. Apartheid was the government’s rigid policy racial segregation between white Europeans and black natives. The official goal of apartheid was to establish laws that would isolate these groups in most activities, especially in education, employment, housing, and politics. The word apartheid means apartness in Afrikaans, one of South Africa’s official languages. This inequity caused great conflict between the races. This conflict can be seen through the experiences of Steven Kumalo and James Jarvis, the main characters in the contemporary novel, on which, this paper is written. Both Steven and James have their own different views of apartheid. The character’s views of racial segregation in the novel, "Cry, The Beloved Country," by Alan Paton, are reciprocated, resulting in new views of the black and white seclusion.Steven Kumalo struggled with both public and private feelings toward the whites who imposed the apartheid upon his people. Steven Kumalo is an old, God-fearing, Zulu pastor from the rural valley of Umzimkulu in the countryside of South Africa (Brutus 361). He is beaconed to the large and over-populated city of Johannesburg to help his ailing sister. It is in the big city that he first publicly and privately realizes his feelings of apartheid. "He sees the condition of the black majority in white-ruled South Africa"(Claiborne 311). Kumalo sees how the natives are not allowed to enter "white only" restaurants, buses, schools, and even churches. His private reaction to this injustice is disbelief. How could the minority have the right to ban the majority, if anything, he be...
