Deterioration of the Tribal System in Cry, the beloved Country

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Throughout the entirety of the novel one of the main points that Paton stresses very heavily is the fact that the tribal system was and is continuing to do deteriorate from start to finish. While his points of view and his opinions on the crumbling of the system are irrelevant Paton does make a fair point in saying that the tribal system and he shows it in various yet numerous parts in the book.
Even from the first chapter of the book when Paton is describing South Africa through the eyes of Kumalo, he shows signs that the tribal system is becoming a thing of the past if not already there. In this quote “They are the valleys of old men and old women… The soil cannot keep them anymore”(pg. 34) Paton is doing a couple of things at once, firstly he is using this for foreshadowing of how a few of the things in the book are, at the same time he is also using it to make an allusion to the tribal system.
When Paton uses the foreshadowing at the end of chapter one very skillfully. He makes it a point to make sure that the reader has no illusion as to how the circumstances are. He foreshadows the feelings of Kumalo and many others by stating “the soil cannot keep them anymore” this becomes overly apparent in the next few chapters of the book when Kumalo talks about his family members that have left the small town of Ndotsheni to head to Johannesburg in search of many things if not just work. He speaks of his sister, who turns out to be a prostitute among other things, his brother, who ends up being a well-known politician, and lastly his son, whom he finds in prison for murder. All these situations show that people are no longer following the traditions of the said “tribal system” and due to this degradation they are leaving their birt...

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...rt illustrating how oppressed the natives are by the new system that replaced the tribal one. The miners are being kept uneducated and unskilled for a reason, and that reason is so that the whites would be able to hire them very cheaply, for one because they were natives, and for two they were uneducated which meant that employers could pay them less due to their ignorance.
All in all there are many things that display the destruction of the tribal system and the people that used it too. Also the book gives a very detailed description of how atrocious the new structures, and laws that were put in the place of the tribal system. Among them are the actions of the people that include Arthur Jarvis, Absalom, Msimangu, Gertrude, And Kumalo himself are able to show the reader many things through their recounting of their stories and how they came to be where they were.

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