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| The flyover started under Apartheid in CapeTown, (photograph 2005) |
Was
it mere coincidence, or a manifestation of karma balancing up some invisible
scales of justice, that Alan Patton’s novel, “Cry, the Beloved Country”, on which the film was based, was
published in the year that Apartheid was instituted, or that Zoltan Korda’s
film of the same name was released in the year the infamous Pass Laws
came into effect?
The
Pass Laws met with intense resentment, because they further tightened
restrictions on the movements of non-whites, and had their origins in the slave
trade. By 1952 non-whites had been deprived of the right to influence their
destiny through democratic means, the right to move freely in their own
country, the right to land ownership in all but a tiny fraction of the vast
territories of South Africa, and the right to marriage and sexual relationships
with whites. It seemed not much had changed since the days of slavery. It also seemed that under white rule, South Africa had brought its own brand of
slavery up to date with the modern world.
*
“Cry,
the Beloved Country” is a heart rending story of how dire the consequences of
Apartheid could be, and with that special talent possessed by children to grasp
the essence of emotional realities, my mind concentrated the message of the whole
film into one scene that stayed with me into adulthood.
Inside
a dwelling, surrounded by silent black hills, a shadow looms over the faces and
into the hearts of a simple country man and his wife. It is the shadow of fear,
a fear greater than any they have known, for they have lost their precious ones
to something sinister and uncaring. As if I had witnessed an unspeakable crime,
a shadow passed over me, and with the great darkness it cast I awoke from innocence, and felt horror and pity for the first time.
*
The
film opens with an idyllic scene of lushly pastured hills and a road following
the soft rolling contour of the land, sweeping gently and curving into the
distance. A neat cluster of thatched rondavels dot the hillside, and a nearby segment
of woodland sits tidily into the ordered patchwork of fields. The impression is
of a peaceful land; prosperous and cared for; a kingdom of harmony unthreatened,
but not without fear. The scene changes to a craggy, claw-like form reaching up
into the sky. It is the edge of a deeply eroded kloof. Cattle graze anxiously
on the meagre stubble and dry grass that pokes out of the bare cracked earth.
Women labor with hoes at the soil; one has a baby tied to her back with a shawl. The scene is accompanied a narration:
“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
grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It is well tended and not
too many cattle feed upon it. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men,
guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed. But the rich green
hills break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their
nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist and the
streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass and too many
fires have burned it. Down in the valleys woman scratch the soil that is left.
They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are
away, the men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them any more.”(Zoltan Korda, 1952)
As
the story unfolds, of Kumalo a simple country minister who travels to
Johannesburg in search of his sister and son, all of South Africa’s woes are
encountered, in a tale of the miserable fates human beings inflict upon each other.
“We
shall live form day to day, and put more locks on our doors, and get a fine
fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our
handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the
raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forgo. We shall forgo
the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over
the starlit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock
that off our lives. And our lives will shrink” (Allan
Patton, 1948:71)
There
is a complete sense of tragedy that comes with the knowledge of an irreversible
wrong, and once innocence has been defiled by fear, the clock cannot be turned
back.
“
The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not
mended again.”
Says
Msimangu, Kumalo’s guide in his search for his sister and his son in the slums
Johannesburg. (Allan Patton, 1948:25)
*
“...O
if we but knew what we do
When
we delve or hew—
Hack
and rack the growing green!
Since
country is so tender
To
touch, her being so slender,
That,
like this sleek and seeing ball
But
a prick will make no eye at all,
Where
we, even where we mean
To
mend her we end her,
When
we hew or delve:
After-comers
cannot guess the beauty been.”
(Gerard
Manley Hopkins, Binsey Poplars)
*
On
the train to Johannesburg, Kumalo is filled with awe and dread at the harsh, barren landscape of bare white
mountains of rock and sand passing by the window. These are the mines and, with
eyes sparkling in naive fascination, Kumalo asks: “Can we see the gold.” (Zoltan Korda, 1952). His
fellow travellers are old hands and their lives are already consumed by a machine that is indifferent to human
needs.
“
There is the wheel. A great iron structure rearing into the air, and a great
wheel above it, going so fast that the spokes play tricks with the sight.” (Alan Patton,1948:17).
Kumalo’s mind is in a whirl of bewilderment. He feels sadness and terror.
“Railway-lines,
railway-lines, it is a wonder. To the left, to the right, so many that he
cannot count. A train rushes past them, with a sudden roaring of sound that
makes him jump in his seat…. Stations, stations, more than he has ever
imagined. People are waiting there in hundreds, but the train rushes past,
leaving them disappointed.” (Alan
Patton,1948:17)
These
men of the land, pulled from the land are like children caught up in something
beyond them, something they cannot understand, and like the train speeding
along its track, incisively cutting through the land, unremittingly the future comes too fast for them. When the future collides with the past
there are casualties on both sides. It seems at first, as it bears the brunt of
the collision that only the past is suffering, but the two fates are
intertwined and losses of the past become losses of the future.
Wrapped
in brightly patterned blankets, shabby ill fitting jackets, woolly hats, or
bashed trilbies cocked on their heads, they travel together segregated from the
white owners of the harsh uncertain world to which they are going. They have
left their women and children and they have left the safety of their homes, driven
by white men’s greed for treasures of the earth, for diamonds and gold, and for
the very land itself.
At
Johannesburg station Kumalo is overwhelmed by the melee of people and confusion.
“Cars and buses one behind the other, more than he has ever imagined.” (Allan Patton,1948:18).
“Cars and buses one behind the other, more than he has ever imagined.” (Allan Patton,1948:18).
Remembering
the story of a child from his village that was crushed by a lorry crossing the
street in Johannesburg, Kumalo reels back from the roadside, paralysed with
fear.
By
1899, just three years after the discovery of gold, Johannesburg had grown to
be the largest city in South Africa, and for rural black Africans it was a
place of bewildering complexity and unimaginable tribulation.
“Oh
my husband, why did we leave the land of our people? There is not much there,
but there is not much here. There is not much food there, but it is better than
here. There is not much food there, but it is shared by all together. If all
are poor, it is not so bad to be poor. And it is pleasant by the river, and
while you wash your clothes the water runs over the stones, and the wind cools
you.” (Alan Patton,1948:52)
One
thing was certain: black Africans had little to choose from between scratching out
an impoverished living in the homelands, or the promise of wages in the mines,
no matter how pitiful those wages were, or how poor the conditions. But leaving
the land was a terrible price to pay, because in the towns conditions were poor
and overcrowded, and away from family and community, gangs, prostitution,
violence and crime flourished. And so one crime begat another. and a seed of
darkness was sown in the hearts of men, spawning a cycle of fear and distrust
that spiralled out of control. The opulent homes of the whites made an easy
target for the black gangs, and in response any sympathy whites may have had
for the conditions of the poor turned to resentment.
Something
did cry out to me from that film:
“Cry
the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear.
Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the
water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes
red the veld with fire. Let him not be moved when the birds of his land are
singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear
will rob him of all if he gives too much.”(Alan
Patton,1948:72)
Because
I was a child when I first saw the film, it cast a great darkness across my innocence, and even though I was just a
child, I knew the cost of living with
fear would mean losing the thing I loved most: to be able to love without
fear.
“Under
the live oaks, shaded and dusky, the maidenhair flourished and gave a good
smell, and under the mossy banks of water courses whole clumps of five-fingured
ferns and goldy-backs hung down. Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns,
cream white and almost sinful-looking, and these were so rare and magical that
a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long.” (Stienbeck, 1952:9).
*
In
1948, when Apartheid was officially made law, a final sense of permanency was
rendered to the countless laws that had nibbled away at the rights of black and
coloured people for three centuries. Like an enduring boxer reigned down upon
by blows in a punishing beating at the hands of a more powerful opponent, the
knockout punch was finally delivered. It was an ignoble victory for the
Reunited National Party. However, as we know, in the rematch forty six years later in
1998, a decisive victory was delivered by Nelson Mandela and the
ANC, and Apartheid was knocked, permanently out of the ring.
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