Cry, The Beloved Country (1948) by Alan Paton. Stephen Kumalo is an old Zulu pastor who journeys from his remote village to the great city of Johannesburg to find his sister, her son, and his own son where they have gone missing. I found the dialogue and interiority in Book 1 unusually terse and formal, and there is a sense of fear and foreboding that may be enervating to the reader. However, I encourage you not to give up in Book 1, because the story becomes significantly more dramatic and eventful in Books 2&3. This is a powerful novel of courageous moral conviction borne of a character’s clear sighted observations and deep learning. As the drama unfolds Paton also provides insights into the white man’s upheaval of native traditional society and their religious, legal, and economic constructs that helped maintain the apartheid state. The novel is of course highly relevant to any country with a white supremacist colonial heritage, because the cruelty, injustice, and fear will continue to adversely affect generations to come on both sides until there is a realization of a shared humanity and welfare.
P56 Msimangu: The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief - and again I ask your pardon - that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten. It suited the white man to break the tribe, he continued gravely, but it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken. I have pondered this for many hours, and I must speak it, for it is the truth for me. They are not all so. There are some white men who give their lives to build up what is broken. But they are not enough, he said. They are afraid, that is the truth. It is fear that rules this land.
This is reiterated on P179: It was permissible to allow the destruction of a tribal system that impeded the growth of the country. It was permissible to believe that its destruction was inevitable. But it is not permissible to watch its destruction, and to replace it by nothing, or by so little, that a whole people, deteriorates, physically and morally. The old tribal system was, for all its violence and savagery, for all it, superstition and witchcraft, a moral system. Our natives today produce criminals and prostitutes and drunkards, not because it is their nature to do so, but because their simple system of order and tradition and convention has been destroyed. It was destroyed by the impact of our own civilization. Our civilization has therefore an inescapable duty to set up another system of order and tradition and convention. It is true that we hope to preserve the tribal system by a policy of segregation. That was permissible. But we never did it thoroughly or honestly. We set aside 1/10 of the land for 4/5 of the people. Thus we made it inevitable, and some say we did it knowingly, that labor would come to the towns. We are caught in the toils of our own selfishness. 
P70 The corrupting nature of power.
P105 There are times, no doubt, when God seems no more to be about the world.
P178 it is not permissible to add to one’s possessions if these things can only be done at the cost of other men. Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation. It might have been permissible in the early days of our country, before we became aware of its cost, in the disintegration of native community life, in the deterioration of native family, life, in poverty, slums and crime. But now that the cost is known, it is no longer permissible.
P187 the truth is that our Christian civilization is riddled through and through with dilemma. We believe in the brotherhood of man, but we do not want it in South Africa. We believe that God endows men with diverse gifts, and that human life depends for its fullness on their employment and enjoyment, but we are afraid to explore this belief too deeply. We believe in help for the underdog, but we want him to stay under. And we are therefore compelled, in order to preserve our belief that we are Christian, to ascribe to Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth, our own human intentions, and to say that because he created white and black, he gives the divine approval to any human action that is designed to keep black men from advancement. We go so far to credit Almighty God with having created black men to hew wood and draw water for white men. We go so far as to assume that He blesses any action that is designed to prevent black men from the full employment of the gifts He gave them. Alongside of these very arguments we use others totally inconsistent, so that the accusation of repression may be refuted. We say we withhold education because the black child has not the intelligence to profit by it; we withhold opportunity to develop gifts because Black people have no gifts; we justify our action by saying that it took us thousands of years to achieve our own advancement, and it would be foolish to suppose that it will take the black man any lesser time, and that therefore there is no need for hurry. We shift our ground again when a black man does achieve something remarkable, and feel deep pity for a man who is condemned to the loneliness of being remarkable, and decide that it is a Christian kindness not to let black men become remarkable. Thus even our God becomes a confused and inconsistent creature, giving gifts and denying them employment. Is it strange then that our civilization is riddled through and through with dilemma? The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate, anxiety, of loving charity and fearful, clutching of possessions.
P191 it is the duty of a judge to do justice, but it is only the people that can be just. Therefore, if justice be not just, that is not to be laid at the door of the judge, but at the door of the people, which means that the door of the white people, for it is the white people that make the law. In South Africa, men are proud of their judges, because they believe they’re incorruptible. Even the black men have faith in them, though they do not always have faith in the law. In a land of fear, this incorruptibility is like a lamp set up upon a stand, giving light to all that are in the house.
P311. I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they turn to loving they will find we are turned to hating.
