Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton — Read

One of the favourite nieces of Margaret Jarvis, Barbara Smith by name, had married a man from Springs, and both Jarvis and his wife, on a day when the Court was not holding the case, went to spend a day with them. He had thought it would be a good thing for his wife, who had taken the death of their son even more hardly than he had feared. The two women talked of the people of Ixopo and Lufafa and Highflats and Umzimkulu, and he left them and walked in the garden, for he was a man of the soil. After a while they called to him to say they were going into the town, and asked if he wished to go with them. But he said that he would stay at the house, and read the newspaper while they were away, and this he did.

The newspaper was full of the new gold that was being found at Odendaalsrust, and of the great excitement that still prevailed on the share-market. Someone with authority was warning people against buying at higher and still higher prices, and saying that there was no proof that these shares were worth what they were fetching, and that they might come down after a while and cause much loss of money and much suffering. There was some crime too; most of the assaults reported were by natives against Europeans, but there was nothing of the terrible nature that made some people afraid to open their newspapers.