Alan Paton’s acclaimed novel Cry, the Beloved Country depicts South Africa on the brink of its descent into full-blown apartheid – the Afrikaans term, as Wikipedia notes, for “apart-hood” or the state of being apart. In 1948, the year of the book’s publication, the National Party began to introduce a stream of legislation that codified racial segregation and formally divided the land and its people. Not until 1994, nearly half a century later, would multiparty, multiracial elections be held, raising Nelson Mandela to the presidency and signaling an end to the system of institutionalized discrimination.

Paton’s book is an act of witness and protest. Against a backdrop of stunning natural beauty, it dissects the ugliness of South African politics. Its central theme is one with which Aung San Suu Kyi has long been associated – the corrosive effects of political fear. “Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.” (This famous passage appears in Book One, chapter 12.) The novel manages, nevertheless, to convey a degree of hope – its subtitle is “a story of comfort in desolation”.

For two reasons I thought of Paton while scrolling through Myanmar news this week. One was the depressing decision of Yangon’s Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival to cancel screenings of a recent documentary, The Open Sky, after social media lit up with criticism of its exploration of anti-Muslim violence inside the country. The other was grim testimony from UN Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Kyung-Wha Kang about the conditions in which displaced Rohingya Muslims are presently held. “In Rakhine, I witnessed a level of human suffering in IDP camps that I have personally never seen before, with men, women, and children living in appalling conditions with severe restrictions on their freedom of movement, both in camps and isolated villages. Many people have wholly inadequate access to basic services including health, education, water and sanitation.”

Sensitive, loaded words such as apartheid can never be used lightly. But Nicholas Kristof was right to employ this term to describe the current situation in Rakhine State. Institutionalized “apart-hood” is exactly what’s going on there. Others are also right to use documentary film, the official structures of the UN and any additional means available to them to engage in acts of witness and protest.