The book Cry, the Beloved Country is an interesting novel about apartheid in South Africa. It talks about a man from a small village named Ndotsheni who travels to a large city to help his city. The theme of the movie Cry Freedom is a lot like the book. The movie is about a reporter 
who goes to South Africa to find out what it was like in the apartheid.
The book and the movie have many parallel themes. One of the biggest themes found in the movie and the book is fear. In the book the first sigh of fear is right in the beginning when he is scared to open a letter because he thinks that it will be a bad letter. Then he travels to a big city named Johannesburg to find he sister he has know Idea what is going on then he finds his son that is a really bad criminal and ends up getting put to death by the court. The movie has also has fear as a very strong theme there is constant police harassment of blacks and other minorities there are caged like animals in not being able to leave there boundaries with out getting in trouble. Another big theme I found was isolation in both the movie and book in the book. Stephen is the leader of a tribe and lives in a small village so he is isolated from what is going on in the larger cities. I don’t think that he could have comprehended what it was like in the big city until he went there.
Toward the end of the movie Cry Freedom the police isolated the reporter by not letting him be with more than one person at one time because they saw him as a threat. The last theme that I found in both the movie and book was innocence. Kumalo really has no idea what is going g on when he travels to the big city. A car almost hits him because he doesn’t know what to do. In the movie the reporter just wants to do a few stories about what it is like being black in apartheid. He ends up getting on trouble with the law. These are the biggest parallel themes I could find between the navel and the movie. Both of these stories do a great job showing us what it is like for blacks to be brought up under apartheid. And it is important for younger people to learn about apartheid so that history does not repeat itself again.
