A beautiful novel that makes me think about fear.

I'm reading the most beautiful book by Alan Paton called Cry, the Beloved Country, which takes place in the mid-1940s in Ndotsheni and Johannesburg, South Africa. It follows the quest of a native priest, named Stephen Kumalo, to find his son, as well as his experiences of and reflections living under white oppression. When the whites came and implanted their European structures, the tribe was broken. The relationship of humans to the land and to each other deteriorated, leading to distrust and subjugation. One major theme in the novel is fear; fear of the oppressed native who resorts to crime, and yet fear of the native who is given rights, opportunity and power. Fear is on every page and in the heart of each character. Paton writes:

We do not know, we do not know. We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego. We shall forego the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all....

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

Perhaps, in some respect, we all live with this fear at a corporate and an individual level - a fear of what would happen if we gave up control. Rather than flourishing to our fullest potential, we create boundaries that limit growth, all because we are afraid of risking failure or loss. We are afraid of the unknown and what it could cost us; we are even afraid to seek justice because we want to keep our power. But perhaps the bars we put up to keep out threats end up becoming our cage and we don't really end up having any power or freedom after all. Perhaps in trying to keep our lives we indeed lose them.