Introduction Cry, the beloved country is a novel that was written by Alan Paton in the year 1948. This book is a very famous novel in the history of South Africa and it turned out to be the worldwide bestseller just after it was published. The novel is about a country of the black man who is under the law of the white man. The book presents a Zulu pastor by the name of Stephen Kumalo and also presents the son to this pastor and the son is called Absalom. These people are set against a setting of land and a people faced by racial discrimination. This paper is going to look at why the native Africans move to the city and what happens to them and those left behind in villages. The paper will also look at the issue of the break up of the tribal system. Why Native Africans are moving to Johannesburg In this novel, the young energetic people move to the city to look for work that is not available in the villages they were born. In most cases, they go to work in the goldmine for the white man. Cities like Johannesburg depend heavily on the labor provided by black people. These people who go to the cities go to work for subsistence pay, they work under poor conditions, and they in turn engage in much crime. This is indicated in the life Absalom and Gedrudge engage in. When Absalom gets to the city, he engages in the life of crime by carrying out burglary which gets him to prison. On the other hand, Gertrude at the time she goes to look for her husband and fails to meet him engages in selling illegal beer and also becomes a prostitute. Most of the people who were left behind in the villages were the old people and the young children. These people encountered difficulties in carrying out activities that could enable them to survive comfortably such as food farming. The children that were left behind with the old people experienced starvation because there was not enough food for them to feed on. In the novel, at the point where Stephen Kumalo takes an initiative to go and look for his son Absalom, his brother John and his sister Gertrude, he refuses to use the little money they had saved for the school fees of Absalom but the wife reminds Mr. Kumalo that those people who go to the city never return “Absalom will never go to St. Chad’s. He is in Johannesburg. When people go to Johannesburg, they never come back”[1]. Break up of the tribal system The society that is shown in this novel is an unjust society. It is a society that is divided on racial grounds. The white people have snatched much of the land that is profitable from the black people. This has caused the black people to move away from the villages to go and work for the white people in the cities breaking away from their tribes. Following the meager income from the labor, these black people engage in crime. In the novel, Misimangu makes an explanation to Kumalo about the situation. He emphasizes that there has been breaking of the tribe by the white man. Misimangu has a strong belief that this is the reason why young black people are always found on the wrong side of the law. He goes ahead to explain concerning the white man that “but it has not suited him to build something in place of what is broken”[2]. This point is as well stressed by Arthur Jarvis where he st