Face to Faith

Remember, the beloved country

A few months ago, I found a copy of Alan Paton's second, but out of print, novel, Too Late The Phalarope, in a secondhand bookshop in Belfast. "He's forgotten now," lamented the owner as he sold me the book. But Paton is perhaps less forgotten than vastly overshadowed by those who, like him, lived under and struggled against the apartheid state: as a politician, by people like Nelson Mandela; as a writer, by Nadine Gordimer.

If we were to better remember Paton in this, his centenary year, for what should it be? Perhaps most enduringly, his work as a novelist. He wrote only three novels and, despite the bookseller's gloomy statement, Cry, The Beloved Country will always be regarded as one of the first works of fiction to expose the brutality of apartheid. Most importantly, however, it should be remembered that everything Paton did - as writer, prison reformer and politician - was inseparable from his Christianity.

His one, short devotional book, An Instrument Of Thy Peace, was a meditation on the prayer of St Francis. It shows his belief that religious faith, personal conduct and social action are inextricable one from the other. His Christianity was not only why apartheid was so offensive to him; its emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation also showed him the only way forward for the new South Africa.

Paton went where his beliefs led him, whatever the cost to himself. As he said, he could do no other. This led to conflict with the Afrikaner state, but also produced uneasy relationships within the anti-apartheid movement - another reason, arguably, why he is less well known today.

He was president of the South African Liberal party, which could never win parliamentary seats in Cape Town, and did not expect to. Its members dissolved it in 1968, rather than abandon their principles and comply with a new apartheid law that made it a criminal offence to belong to a non-racial political party.

Though the Liberals sought links with it, the African National Congress (ANC) kept its distance. Paton had given defence evidence for Mandela at the 1964 treason trial, but Liberals tended to be antipathetic to ANC communist members. The Indian National Congress also kept at arm's length.

Paton and the Liberals were gradualists: they believed in constitutional talks. He opposed sanctions. Most of all, they opposed violence, which set them at odds with the armed struggle that was ANC policy after 1961. Paton's solutions seemed, to many, hopelessly inadequate, though he too was persecuted by the state - his passport was removed and, for years, he was followed everywhere.

Paton's Christianity dated back to his strict Christadelphian upbringing. His father's favour of corporal punishment shaped his progressive views on juvenile offenders, which he put into practice as principal of Diepkloof Reformatory. His pacifist inclinations were so strong that he considered establishing a settlement, run on Gandhian lines, for black TB patients, a group with whom he and his first wife had once worked.

In Africa, he feared a fatal and bloody collision between white and black nationalism. In the face of that potential, he sought reconciliation as the way forward. The power of Cry, The Beloved Country, with its poetic but less stressed biblical language, comes from its expression of reconciliation and understanding in the midst of division and brutality.

Paton called the first volume of his autobiography Toward The Mountain. He saw his life as an allegory, and like Bunyan's Pilgrim, felt impelled to undertake a journey, through dark valleys and over sun-touched peaks. The destination was Isaiah's holy mountain, where none would hurt or destroy.

He kept the faith, and ran the race, and post-apartheid South Africa exemplifies much of what he propounded, which was less easy to do in the midst of apartheid. Dying in 1988, he did not live to see the new land, but it was not born in bloodshed, nor did the formerly oppressed become the oppressors. The country came into being by the constitutional talks he had advocated, and it shares power in a way he would have supported. It is the non-racial state he stood for, and a practical expression of his unwavering Christian vision.

· Terry Philpot is a freelance writer

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