Cry The Beloved Country By A. Jarvis: Fear Brainstorming

Section: English Essays

Wound through everything is fear:

**Whites fear not just black crime, but also a black uprising if speakers such as John **Blacks fear white retaliation for strikes and boycotts.

**Kumalo is afraid to know what has happened to his son; his son is afraid of what his father will say; the girl is afraid of life in general; John is afraid of the police.

**Fear is almost a climate of life, and whites are depicted as the ones to blame.

**Paton conveys very well how he thinks Afrikaners came to perceive blacks as dangerous and to fear them enough to want to establish a

system of racial segregation. Some Afrikaners, however, would add religious belief as a basis for segregation. Some Afrikaners interpret passages of the Bible on the descendants of Noah's sons to mean that

God wants total separation of the races, and that whites are naturally

superior. Paton explains that some whites struggle with their own consciences over racial segregation.

**An unidentified white person in the novel offers, "Which do we suffer, a law-abiding, industrious and purposeful people, or a lawless, idle and purposeless people? The truth is that we don't know, for we fear them both."

**10. The last few sentences Arhur Jarvis wrote before his death, are provocative: "The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate anxiety, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions."

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