Recommendations
Books Like Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
South Africa's moral founding document
If you were moved by Paton's biblical lament over South Africa — Kumalo's journey to Johannesburg, Absalom's murder trial, the encounter between two fathers across the racial divide — these books offer comparable moral weight in South African literature, the literature of racial justice, and the African literary tradition that Paton helped establish.
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Buy on AmazonToo Late the Phalarope
by Alan Paton
Paton's second novel — an Afrikaner policeman destroyed by the Immorality Act; the same moral universe applied to a different racial tragedy in apartheid South Africa.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Disgrace
by J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee's post-apartheid masterpiece — the literature that Cry, the Beloved Country made possible; the liberal tradition examining what post-apartheid South Africa actually looks like.
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Buy on AmazonBurger's Daughter
by Nadine Gordimer
Gordimer's anti-apartheid novel — the next generation of South African fiction; where Paton is liberal and Christian, Gordimer is Marxist and politically radical.
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Buy on AmazonNative Son
by Richard Wright
Wright's African American novel — the same argument as Cry, the Beloved Country: the system creates the crime; individual moral failure cannot be separated from social structure.
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Buy on AmazonA Dry White Season
by André Brink
Brink's anti-apartheid novel — an Afrikaner schoolteacher investigating the torture death of his friend's son; the liberal tradition engaging the most extreme apartheid violence.
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Buy on AmazonNervous Conditions
by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Dangarembga's Zimbabwean feminist novel — the African perspective that Paton's novel (written by a white man) cannot provide; the colonized woman's experience of the same historical moment.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Waiting for the Barbarians
by J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee's political allegory — the philosophical depth that Paton's moral liberalism becomes in the next generation of South African fiction; complicity and the cost of moral assertion.
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Buy on AmazonLong Walk to Freedom
by Nelson Mandela
Mandela's autobiography — the political history within which Cry, the Beloved Country is set; the other side of the story Paton could only imagine from the outside.
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