Throughout the novel one of the main points that Paton strongly emphasizes is the fact that the tribal system was and continues to deteriorate from the beginning to the end. Although his views and opinions on the collapse of the system are irrelevant, Paton is right that the tribal system and shows this in various but numerous parts of the book. Even from the first chapter of the book when Paton describes South Africa through the eyes of Kumalo, he shows signs that the tribal system is becoming a thing of the past, if not already existing. In this quote "They are the valleys of the old men and women... The ground can no longer hold them" (p. 34) Paton is doing a couple of things at once, firstly he is using this to foreshadow how some of the things in the book are, at the same time he also uses it to make an allusion to the tribal system. When Paton uses foreshadowing at the end of the first chapter very cleverly. It is important to make sure the reader has no illusions about what the circumstances are like. He foreshadows the feelings of Kumalo and many others by stating that "the soil can no longer hold them", this becomes overly evident in the next few chapters of the book when Kumalo talks about his family members who have left the small town of Ndotsheni to head to Johannesburg. looking for many things if not just work. He talks about his sister, who turns out to be a prostitute, his brother, who ends up being a well-known politician, and finally his son, who he finds in prison for murder. All these situations demonstrate that people no longer follow the traditions of the aforementioned “tribal system” and due to this degradation they are leaving their birth…… middle of paper……rt illustrating how oppressed the natives are by the new system that replaced the tribal one . The miners are kept uneducated and unskilled for a reason, and that reason is that the whites could have hired them very cheaply, firstly because they were natives, and secondly because they were uneducated, which meant that the employers could pay them less because of their ignorance. All in all there are many things that show the destruction of the tribal system and also the people who used it. Furthermore the book gives a very detailed description of how atrocious the new structures and laws that were put in place of the tribal system are. Among these are the actions of people who include Arthur Jarvis, Absalom, Msimangu, Gertrude and Kumalo himself are able to show the reader many things through the telling of their stories and how they got to where they were.