Interested: 05 Availablity: In Stock
All Religious Books are available in Temple Stores. Our mission is to share the Good of Hinduism, Loving, Faith and Serving.
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014), the South African Nobel laureate, is renowned for her unflinching portrayal of the moral and psychological toll of apartheid. Her 1956 short story, “Six Feet of the Country,” is a quintessential example of her early work. At first glance, the story seems to be a simple, tragic anecdote about a poor African man who dies and is buried, and the ensuing bureaucratic struggle to retrieve his body. However, beneath this surface lies a profound exploration of racial insensitivity, the chasm between white privilege and black suffering, the failure of liberal goodwill, and the impersonal, dehumanizing machinery of the apartheid state.
The narrative centers around the protagonist, a white farmer's wife, who is confronted with the task of arranging for the burial of Paulus, a black farmworker. As she navigates the bureaucratic process of obtaining a permit for the burial, she becomes increasingly frustrated with the authorities' obstruction and the apathy of her husband, a white farmer who employs Paulus.
“Six Feet of the Country” is a precise, morally acute story that uses the microcosm of a farm death to expose the macrocosm of apartheid’s inhumanity. Gordimer’s craft—quiet, observant narration; focus on bureaucratic detail; and refusal to sentimentalize—makes the story a sustained indictment of how everyday procedures, private anxieties, and legal forms conspire to devalue and erase the humanity of Black South Africans. The narrative’s tragedy is not only the death it depicts but the human capacity to normalize such deaths through paperwork, manners, and the refusal to translate pity into resistance.
Nadine Gordimer ’s short story (1956) is a poignant exploration of racial division, systemic inequality, and the dehumanizing effects of apartheid in South Africa. Quick Summary
The white authorities at the cemetery office tell him, with total indifference, that there was a mix-up with the paperwork. Instead of his brother, another black man—a complete stranger—was buried in the plot that was supposed to be for the narrator’s brother. Worse, they cannot locate the narrator's brother at all. The bodies were swapped because, as the clerk says, “they are all natives.”
One evening, their Black employee, Petrus, comes to them in distress. Petrus’s younger brother, who had recently arrived from the countryside looking for work, has died suddenly from pneumonia. The brother was not legally registered to be in the urban area, and as a result, the authorities have buried him in an unmarked, common pauper’s grave—a "six feet of the country"—outside the town’s official cemetery.
