Although Alan Paton has come to be known as the poet of South African race relations, his point of greatest involvement often seems to be the more universal and eternal mystery of father-son relations…. [In his play Sponono] the same theme occasionally comes to the surface to capture our deeper interest in this admirable if routine portrait of life in a South African reformatory.

For while Mr. Paton and his collaborator, Krishna Shah, have with some success caught the whole panorama of a reformatory life that seems not essentially different from what it is in some American institutions of this kind, and have added to it a folk overtone unique to the conflict between tribal Africa and the ways of its European colonizers, it is in those moments when the principal attempts to break through to his most hopeful and difficult protégé, Sponono, that we are most...