Yonder Over Africa

CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY (278 pp.]--Alan Paton--Scribner ($3).

The hero of this novel is like the title, a trifle bewildered about English syntax but eloquent just the same. He is an old black man in an old black suit, pastor of a poor country church in Natal, and South Africa is seen through his hurt and innocent eyes. Father Stephen Kumalo is a Zulu whom white missionaries redeemed from darkness. But neither he nor his tribe have found peace on earth since the tribal society was destroyed.

To Father Kumalo one day comes a letter from a brother in Christ in a Johannesburg mission. The letter informs him that his younger sister, Gertrude, is very sick. He must go to Johannesburg.

In the crowds and slums of the frightening city, Father Kumalo finds out what has happened to his people, whom the used-up land no longer supports and who swarm to the mines and compounds, homeless and without families. His sister has become a prostitute, his son a thief. There are few kafferboeties, or white men who work for the welfare of the blacks. One of them is killed by a housebreaker, and to his terrible sorrow the old man learns that his son Absalom was the killer. . This situation allows the novelist to dramatize with irony a complex of interracial tensions in which there seems little but heartbreak for the just and disinterested. Although it is as much meditation as fiction in certain parts, and the meditation is not always as profound as it is impassioned, Cry, the Beloved Country has moments of distinction.

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