The Long Defeat

Alan Paton’s Quest to Become an Instrument of God’s Peace

By Bryan Jarrell

n December of 1960, after three weeks of I business in Europe, Alan Paton stepped off the plane in his homeland of South Africa. The famed author had gained global notoriety in 1948 with the publication of his novel Cry, the Beloved Country, and had used the proceeds from his book to fund his own anti-Apartheid activism. He was a key founder of the Liberal Party of South Africa, one of the only mixedrace political parties in a deeply segregated nation. Paton was also a well-known Anglican Christian, a faithful churchman, and a guiding voice for global Christians waking up to the racial implications of the gospel. Hopes were high that he could rally national and international voices against the

entrenching power of Apartheid.

But in December 1960, once he’d returned to South Africa, police confiscated his passport. His activism had not gone unnoticed. Grounded, the internationally renowned Paton would spend the next ten years confined in his home nation. By the end of the decade he would suffer harassment by secret police, the dissolution of the political party he helped build, the death of his wife, and a criminal accusation that jeopardized his whole life’s work. Paton’s hopes for his beloved South Africa, particularly his hope for peace between its black and white citizens, would be crushed by authoritarian whims. He would die in 1988, a mere six years before Apartheid finally suffered political defeat.

What must it be like to devote one’s life to a goal and never see its fruition? Certainly it must be heartbreaking, even if the goal itself is full of virtue and value. Paton spent much of his career writing and speaking about “man’s inhumanity to man” and the need to love indiscriminately, as Jesus did. Late in life he wrote that for South Africa he wished to be—quoting the famous prayer attributed to St. Francis—an instrument of God’s peace. He believed firmly that love, specifically divine love, was the only way to navigate the complex post-colonial and racial realties of his time.

Paton’s life shows that to be one of God’s instruments is a costly prospect, a mixed bag of victory and loss that often lacks the glory we would associate with religion. Paton may not be as well-known as other civil rights authors or politicians, but for Christians of any stripe or denomination who care about matters of race and matters of grace, his life and literature and successes and failures are a wellspring of sobering insight.

Although Paton was of English descent, he did not grow up in an Anglican context. His father was abusive and unkind, and held the family to the legalism and anti-Trinitarian doctrines of the Christadelphian sect. Thanks to kind mentors in his boarding school, Paton excelled academically and came to a broad church and evangelical faith in the context of a campus ministry. He developed a lifelong appreciation of the Bible and began to read it with regularity. After graduating, he taught at several regional boarding schools and joined his wife’s Anglican church, all the while hoping to secure a position in politics. Perhaps because he had spent most of his young adult life in a world of prep schools and academia, he would be known as a strict schoolmaster—slow to listen and quick to paddle, his church membership notwithstanding.

In 1936, Paton was hired at 33 as the warden at Diepkloof, a borstal (a type of prison) for black boys outside of Johannesburg. It would be his first political appointment, his first significant cross-cultural experience with black South Africans, and his first significant exposure to systemic racism. What Paton discovered when he arrived at Diepkloof was a moral tragedy. The youth were malnourished, uneducated, sick, and loaned out to local farmers like slaves. They were packed into dirty cells and frequently tried to escape. Paton was appalled, noting that the institution seemed designed to maximize suffering instead of social rehabilitation.

Over the next 14 years, Paton overhauled Diepkloof. Perpetual punishment was out; freedom (paired with responsibility) was in. His wards, whom he called “students,” were given proper food, clothing, and healthcare. They were suitably educated, taught trades, and if well behaved were permitted to visit

family on the weekends. Paton hired a number of black teachers, and released the white teachers who refused to work alongside their new colleagues. His students passed national standardized tests, and proudly marched in paramilitary formations around the camp to impress visiting dignitaries. The reforms were so successful that the barbed wire fencing enclosing the institution was torn down. The students weren’t running away anymore.

It’s not wrong to say that Paton was a prison reformer ahead of his time, implementing successful reforms in the 1930s that still seem novel ninety years later. While overseeing the borstal, however, he realized that the problems facing his youth were much larger than poor discipline, education, and daily structure. The stern guidance of an English schoolmaster helped these boys, but it was not enough. He saw how the dissolution of tribal communities had broken down family support systems. White supremacy and economic racism kept black South Africans from the kind of good jobs that could have lowered the crime rate. True juvenile reform was impossible, he concluded, without greater social reforms. He could help the students under his care, but was it possible to imagine a South Africa that sent him fewer boys in need of care?

While exploring these ideas, Paton was asked to serve on a special Bishop’s Committee with the Anglican Church in South Africa to address the church’s official stances on race and politics. He had been a regular attendee at his local Anglican church, serving as a churchwarden and on diocesan councils. For two years, Paton met with delegates weekly to study theology, politics, and the Bible, and to recommend policy stances for the church. Their conclusion was scripturally sound but politically unpopular: white supremacy cannot be supported by any Christian church.

In 1946, after World War II had concluded, Paton self-funded a trip around the world to visit other juvenile reformatories. He walked away unimpressed, and gratified to see that his work at Diepkloof was truly world-class. Long transcontinental train and boat rides gave him time to reflect on the political, racial, and spiritual realities he had witnessed at Diepkloof and studied with the Bishop’s commission. He began to compose a novel that integrated these themes. In San Francisco, as his world tour came to a close, Paton handed off a finished manuscript to eager American publishers. It came to be called Cry, the Beloved Country.

A true masterpiece, the novel weaves together the story of two fathers whose sons are swept away in the colonial fissures of postwar South Africa. The first is a black father, the Anglican pastor of his small rural church, who is called into Johannesburg to rescue his sister and his son, who have slipped into dangerous and criminal lifestyles. The second is a white father, a wealthy businessman whose son has eschewed the family business and embraced a life of racial activism. When both sons are killed, the two fathers come together in mutual grief, realizing that the racism of their nation takes the lives of everyone’s children, black and white, oppressor and oppressed. Perhaps the death of these sons, mirroring the death of the Son of God, could bring together disparate peoples so that nobody else’s sons would have to die. Written in plain, elegant prose, Cry, the Beloved Country gave the world a glimpse at the beauty of South Africa alongside the tragedy of its systemic racism.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of this nov-

el, which in Paton’s lifetime would sell more than 15 million copies and be translated into 20 languages. Paton had managed to turn the world’s attention to the rising tide of white nationalism in South Africa. Fan letters poured in from across the world, as did offers for movie, musical, and stage rights. Even in 2022, the book remains required reading in many high school literature classes. Paton loathed nothing more than authoritarians— undoubtedly a reflection of his own abusive upbringing—and he was delighted that the book gave his nationalist political opponents a worldwide black eye.

Few people in South Africa, however, would be moved by Paton’s novel. Three months after the book hit the American shelves in 1948, the Nationalist Party (NP) won the general elections and took control of South Africa’s parliament. The NP was an all-white Afrikaner party, run by descendants of Dutch and French colonials from the 1600s. The word “apartheid” is derived from the Afrikaner word for “separate,” an appropriate word to describe the ideology explicitly held by the party. Coming to control parliament for the first time, the NP began to implement a number of strict racial divides that kept white South Africans in political power and barred black South Africans from economic and political opportunities. In the same year that Cry was making waves across the world, Apartheid was officially established in South Africa.

Indeed, Paton saw the political tides turning. Once assured of his novel’s financial success, he resigned from his post at Diepkloof, unable to bear the thought of his beloved school being torn apart by politicians, and unwilling to stay around and watch it happen. Financially independent from the sales of his book, he looked for new ways to fight in the political arena.

Informed by a Christian zeal and his years of penal reform, Paton joined with a number of his allies to form the Liberal Party of South Africa in 1953. Against the authoritarianism of the new government, the group argued for classic liberal ideas, like one-man, onevote and due process of law, regardless of skin color. It uniquely welcomed black and white members in its ranks and committed itself to nonviolent actions. The party rarely succeeded in elections: few members were

ever elected to national seats. But the political process gave the Liberal Party a platform to try and convince white South Africans to oppose the National Party. At a time when black South Africans were required to carry passbooks to enter white neighborhoods, the Liberal Party would hold desegregated rallies featuring black and white political voices sharing the same stage. That same year, Paton also finished his second novel, Too Late the Phalarope, which, like his first, was eagerly devoured and approved of by the literary critics of the world. Between his global notoriety and international fundraising efforts, Paton and his party were more like prophets than politicians, calling the nation to reform at a time it refused to do so.

The politics of South Africa dramatically changed after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when 69 black demonstrators were killed and hundreds wounded by white South African police. Across the nation enraged black protestors rioted in the streets and were met by violent retaliation from white police. Martial law was declared, major black political parties were deemed terrorist organizations, and a decade of violence began to take shape. Members of Paton’s Liberal Party were arrested and would find themselves imprisoned or on house arrest for years. The very week that the Sharpeville Massacre took place, Paton had premiered a musical about gang life and urbanization called Mkhumbane to an integrated audience in a public theater. And while the NP hadn’t targeted him yet due to his global notoriety, his passport would be confiscated by the end of the year.

Over the next decade, Paton would find himself increasingly isolated. Politics had grown violent after Sharpeville, and many activists rejected the Liberal Party’s firm commitment (along with Paton’s faith-filled commitment) to nonviolence. Not only was he considered an enemy by the white NP, but some black activists also began to condemn him for not supporting their call to violent resistance. Paton’s elderly mother, who had shunned him after he left the Christadelphian cult, needed extra care for her dementia, and came to live with him in 1965. Soon after her arrival, she died. Meanwhile, Paton’s wife had developed emphysema and was slowly losing her lungs to the disease. Theirs was a difficult marriage, one marked by sexual and vocational frustrations but also a dutiful love and a Christian spirit. Paton himself developed crippling migraines and hemorrhoids, symptoms of overwhelming stress. Police were stalking him daily, parking outside his house, trailing his car rides, recording his whereabouts, raiding his home for illicit material. At least twice, he went to start his car, only to find a bullet hole in the vehicle’s engine block or gas tank.

Amidst all this, Paton wrote a small devotional book titled Instrument of Thy Peace. It included 21 short reflections on the famous Franciscan prayer, and spoke to his spirituality at the time. Though it would become Paton’s second bestselling book next to Cry, it is not a groundbreaking work of Christian devotion. Modern readers are likely to find the volume dated, moralistic, and uninspiring. The prayer in question includes a number of self-abnegations, which form the backbone for Paton’s reflections: “O Master, let me not seek as much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.” Reading the work now, and knowing the difficult season Paton was enduring at the time, one wonders if he could have been praying the opposite. It was a time when anyone would have needed consolation,

understanding, and love. One senses in Paton a holy frustration, a deep anxiety over his Christian identity and his activism and writing—a fear that although he said his prayers, supported Christian organizations, and dutifully attended church, God wasn’t using him. Why wasn’t any of it working?

Instrument arrived in 1968, which proved to be the darkest year of Paton’s life. His wife died from her emphysema after 40 years of marriage, leaving him tired and alone, as many of his friends and supporters were under house arrest and in jail. The NP passed a law forbidding mixed-race political parties, which shut down the Liberal Party after 15 years of toil. For a season, Paton sank into depression, drinking heavily and scaring his friends and neighbors with erratic behavior. His lowest moment came when a policeman found him unconscious and nearly dead in his car on the side of a road, while two figures ran off into the night escaping arrest. Eventually, those two figures were caught, a criminal and a prostitute, both black. They in turn accused Paton of soliciting the black woman for sex before a disagreement on the details brought them to blows. Paton was found innocent by the court, though many who knew him well, including his sons and his authorized biographer, believed he was not. Regardless, it was, for Paton, a nationwide front-page embarrassment.

It was Paton’s second marriage, to his newly hired secretary in early 1969, that brought him out of his depressive tailspin. Then aged 65, his most active years were behind him. His political party was gone, but he continued to write for political magazines and compose poetry. In 1970 his passport was reissued, and he began to travel and speak across the world again. This time, however, the invitations to speak often came with honorifics—awards and honorary degrees for the man who had turned the world’s attention to the beauties and tragedies of South Africa. At age 78, Paton penned his third and final novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, to reverent but mixed reviews. He died peacefully with family nearby at age 85 in 1988.

What, then, to make of this long and varied life? In Paton we have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. A penal reformer of the highest caliber, blessing the lives of thousands of young black men who otherwise would have been destined to suffer. A novelist of global fame, embroidering the passion of Christ into the fabric of South African Apartheid. A political figure, who longed to change the hearts and minds of his fellow countrymen, but never made the progress he envisioned. An instrument of God’s peace, albeit one whose moral character frequently missed the mark he so desperately wanted to hit.

Peter Alexander writes in his exhaustive 1994 biography of Paton that his faith was the core conviction behind his public and private life. Christianity was “the linchpin of his existence… He was, in fact, a rich and strange mixture of sinner and saint, of simplicity and complexity, pride and humility. It was the constant lifelong struggle with himself that gave him the capacity to understand the weakness of others.”

One of Paton’s contemporaries was The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, though there’s no evidence the two ever met. In Tolkien’s fantasy world, Galadriel, the radiant and immortal elven queen, describes her own lifelong battle, against the evil wizard Sauron. “Together through ages of the world we have

fought the long defeat,” she says, collapsing thousands of years of conflict and hardship into a single weighty sentence. True virtue, Tolkien suggests, is not defined by victory, but by holding fast to the good even when defeat seems inevitable. Success isn’t the final word for every hero, and it certainly wasn’t for Paton. Faithfulness to the good is laudable, but it is doubly so in the face of oblivion.

“Fighting the long defeat” well describes the life of Alan Paton. Alongside all these other good works, Paton ghostwrote speeches for black leaders, funded Christian youth summer camp programs, and funneled global donations into South Africa to those facing political persecution. But he would not live to see the great victory of Apartheid’s downfall in 1994, when the NP finally lost its political hold on the nation. Nor would he see that his novel would still be recognized and loved 75 years after its publication. Still, such a literary victory serves to highlight the work yet to be done in the heart of man. Paton would have been content to know that he kept firm in his faith and his commitment to love. He would likely have appreciated the words St. Paul, in his old age, wrote to his protégé Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:7). It is notable that in St. Paul’s sentiment, the race and the fight are completed, but neither are necessarily “won.”

We might also reflect with curiosity on whether Paton’s activism did as much to spread his vision of love as his writing or his educational work. His time as warden at Diepkloof, of course, directly impacted the lives of thousands of young black boys. And his novels reached just about every corner of the globe. One wonders if there isn’t a lesson here for our own work in addressing the racial and colonial wounds in our context. The desire for political influence is intoxicating, surely, but it was a decade of selfless service and a great work of literature that ultimately became Paton’s greatest and most fulfilling successes.

Still, in the year 2022, the Christian may wonder with legitimate frustration why the social ills of our time have not been solved. Why haven’t human hearts turned to love? Why haven’t our sincere efforts to change the world been met with heavenly blessing and ultimate victory? In Paton, we find that such frustrations are common for those instruments of God’s peace. What might it look like, then, to reframe our lives in the terms of “faithfulness to the good” instead of a completed todo list? Would it make a difference to our understanding of providence if we redefined success as fidelity? Paton’s life suggests that a desire to be an instrument is more effective than a desire to win. Somehow in the mix of an abusive father, a difficult first marriage, penal reform, literary stardom, and political disappointment, God’s work was accomplished in the life of Alan Paton. He would never be able to see exactly how, of course, but that was never his prayer, either. As long as he was useful, he could be at peace.