Examples Of Population In Cry The Beloved Country

Oppressing a Population

In Alan Paton’s work Cry the Beloved Country, the white race of people know how to perfectly skew society in South Africa so it ends up in their favor.Countless instances are displayed in which the white put themselves on a pedestal and see themselves as worth more than the blacks. Now granted, while a feeling of hope is encouraged throughout the novel, it is overshadowed by the ever daunting elements of discrimination. There are few whites who act in a way contrary to the rest of the population, namely the Jarvis family. but for the rest of the white population, less for the blacks meant more for them. Cry, the Beloved Country illustrates that taking away vital elements from a population allows oppression to thrive.

By doing so, they are able to keep the blacks doing the manual labor jobs that they themselves do not wish to do. In the first of Arthur’s writings that James Jarvis reads, it states that “It is not permissible to keep men unskilled for the sake of unskilled work”(178). By only educating the white people, they are able to snatch all the high end jobs, leaving the blacks to sift through all the unwanted jobs. In another one of Arthur’s writings, he says; “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 there is no need to hurry”(187). Not only does it affect the black people, but the white people as well. This concept ends up having a reverse effect, because when the whites refuse to educate a whole population of individuals, they are diminishing the overall potential of the country. How much better would South Africa be today if they had provided the necessary education to all the individuals that would have greatly improved the country? Another issue brought about by education is the quality of farming. Ndotsheni desperately needs better programs to educate their farmers. Kumalo approaches the chief of the land and asks for the classes to be moved to Ndotsheni. He says, “They have been teaching these things for many years. Yet it is sad to look at the place where they are teaching it. There is neither grass nor water there”(265). The white people are teaching farming where Farming isn’t possible. Farming is a very important thing in the valley, for the blacks didn’t have any money to buy