The narrator’s brother has been lost in the system—buried in an unknown, unmarked grave, denied even the meager six feet of earth his family requested.
The narrator's wife, Lerice, represents a different facet of the white South African psyche. Unlike her husband, she possesses a latent capacity for empathy. She engages directly with the farm's daily realities and feels a genuine, instinctive grief when the young man dies. However, her empathy is ultimately impotent. She is trapped within the same oppressive system as her husband, and her emotional outbursts do nothing to alter the tragic outcome or dismantle the power structures that enable it.
Petrus, the narrator’s employee and the dead man’s brother, is a figure of quiet, tragic dignity. He navigates the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of apartheid with a mixture of grief and grim determination. He is the one who reveals the truth about his brother's illegal status, and his decision to pool the workers' savings to pay for the exhumation is a powerful act of agency and solidarity. Ironically, Petrus operates under the mistaken assumption that "white men have everything, can do anything". His devastating education is that even his employer, a white man, is ultimately powerless against the inhuman machinery of the state. Petrus embodies the silent, enduring suffering of the Black majority, whose needs and rituals are deemed irrelevant by the white-run bureaucracy.
After navigating endless paperwork and red tape, the narrator successfully arranges for a coffin to be delivered to the farm. The workers host a solemn, deeply moving funeral procession, carrying the coffin across the fields to a makeshift cemetery on the property. Lerice joins the mourners, visibly moved by the dignity of the ritual, while the narrator watches from a distance, feeling like an outsider.
Nadine Gordimer’s "Six Feet of the Country" explores the systemic cruelty of apartheid South Africa through the story of a black laborer's desperate attempt to bury his brother, who died illegally on a white-owned farm. The narrative highlights the dehumanization of black individuals under apartheid, as bureaucratic indifference results in the wrong body being returned to the family after a costly, sacrificial, and ultimately futile effort to secure a proper burial.
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The narrator tries to pay to resolve the issue, demonstrating a belief that money can fix any problem. However, the emotional toll on Petrus is immense. The story highlights the disparity between the white couple's casual life and the intense, high-stakes life of their employees, whose existences are fragile due to discriminatory laws.
One evening, a young African man who works for them—a garden boy named Petrus—approaches the narrator. Petrus is anxious. He explains that his younger brother, who has been visiting from a distant rural area (the "reserves"), is very sick. The brother’s name is Johannes. Petrus asks the narrator for a pass to take Johannes to town to see a white doctor.
: The farm’s foreman. He is dignified, responsible, and fiercely loyal to his family. His quiet determination to secure a proper burial for his brother highlights the profound humanity that the apartheid state attempts to erase. Major Themes The Universal Right to Land
The state machinery in the story is not designed to help citizens; it is designed to control, categorize, and suppress them. The pass laws, illegal immigrant status, and cold handling of the corpse show how legal frameworks were weaponized to strip non-white individuals of their dignity. Historical Context
: The narrator's wife is a fascinating counterpoint. Once a would-be actress, she has "sunk into the business of running the farm with all the serious intensity with which she once imbued the shadows in a playwright's mind". Her hands have become "hard as a dog's pads". Lerice represents a form of authentic engagement. While her husband is a distant weekend visitor, Lerice lives the farm's reality. She is the one who tends to the sick children of their employees, and it is her practical, unromantic devotion to the land and its people that throws her husband's comfortable distance into sharp relief. She is not immune from the system's privileges, but her character suggests a more genuine, if still flawed, connection to the human cost of rural life.
To fully grasp the story's nuances, one must understand the oppressive machinery of , officially instituted by the National Party in 1948. This system of legalized racial segregation stripped the Black majority of fundamental human rights, confining them to "homelands" (Bantustans), restricting their movement through stringent pass laws, and reserving the best land, jobs, and social privileges for the white minority. The pass laws, in particular, required Black South Africans to carry a "passbook" at all times, and being in a prescribed "white area" without proper documentation was a criminal offense, often leading to arrest, imprisonment, and forced labor. Gordimer's story depicts this brutal reality not through grand political pronouncements, but through the intimate scale of a single, tragic incident.
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Petrus asks for help to bury his brother on the farm. The narrator, initially taking a detached, bureaucratic approach, tries to assist with the funeral arrangements. However, they soon find themselves in a labyrinth of red tape. The state requires a post-mortem, and the body is removed by the police.After the examination, the body is treated with complete disregard—treated as an object rather than a human being—and Petrus is denied the ability to bury his brother properly in a place he feels comfortable.
"Six Feet of the Country" is a short story that revolves around the death of a young farmworker, Paulus, who dies after being electrocuted while working on a farm in South Africa. The story begins with the news of Paulus's death, which sets off a chain of events that exposes the deep-seated social and economic inequalities of the time.
Comprehensive Summary and Analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s "Six Feet of the Country"