Liberalism, Free Will, and Racial (In)justice: A Postcolonial Reading of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country Shashank Gupta College

According to Audrey Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” However, it seems that Alan Paton never came to this realisation, for the use of his Christian-Liberal ideology in his magnum opus, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) not only proves to be problematic but also subsequently results in, as this essay aims to highlight, a contradiction of his own vision of reform and change. In other words, Paton sought to empower his fellow citizens of colour and voice their concerns in his novel but spectacularly failed to do so, as the people of colour at the end of the novel still stand where they stood at the beginning of it, that is, at the periphery of the power hierarchy; these people are not allowed to move outside their position on the power hierarchy, even for a short while.

Keeping in mind that the novel follows the realist tradition and that displaying the person of colour as a powerful entity will not be ideal, the depiction of people of colour in the novel still remains condemnable in the sense that there are no incidents of overt or covert resistance by the people of colour...