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 moved….

The truest problem of this play … is the exploration of Sponono's compulsions to good and evil and of the principal's parental necessity to be fair to all his sons as he patiently encourages their adjustment to an unjust society while trying to respond to one extraordinarily profound boy in his charge.

There can be no simple answer or even full understanding of such a boy, and the play wisely dismisses the traditional sociological excuses it briefly considers. It does suggest that the principal's inability to believe one true statement among a pack of Sponono's lies set off the latter's self-destructive and antisocial transformation from good to evil. And insofar as all school principals and fathers find themselves unwilling or unable to sustain the degree of attention and faith required by this sort of boy, this constitutes a tragic fact of existence irrespective of the ultimate fate of either party.