Kontakion for you Departed, by Alan Paton (used)

The author of Cry, the Beloved Country has written Kontakion For You Departed both as a tribute to his wife, who died in October 1967, and as an account of his remarkable professional and political life as one of the leading liberal progressives in South Africa.

Alan Paton first met Dorrie in 1925 on the tennis courts at Ixopo when she was a mischievous married woman of twenty-eight and he was an innocent young schoolteacher six years her junior. Three months later her husband died, and three years later, following a courtship both happy and painful, she married the author. Paton describes how his wife's devotion and humour supported him through the thirteen years when, as principal, he reformed and transformed the grim Diepkloof Reformatory for seven hundred delinquent African boys, and sustained him through the upheaval which followed the international success of Cry, the Beloved Country. He tells how, for fifteen years, they worked together with the Liberal Party to challenge South Africa's racial conventions, and shared the vicious reprisals for these activities: harassment by the security police, threats on their lives, obscene anonymous letters, extensive damage to their car on three occasions. The culmination was the passing of legislation which finally destroyed the Liberal Party in 1968.

As well as being the intimate, moving record of a long and loving relationship, Kontakion For You Departed is a portrait of a courageous, loyal and exuberant woman, and a testimony to Alan Paton's own dedicated struggle for equity and enlightenment in his ‘beloved country.’

Condition: good