Desperate to help his employee—or perhaps to absolve his own guilt—the narrator makes one final attempt. He writes a letter to the Secretary for Native Affairs, the highest authority, appealing the decision. Weeks pass. Finally, a reply arrives. It is a formal, typed letter, signed by a faceless official. The letter states that after careful consideration, the application for exhumation and transfer of the remains of “Native Johannes” is denied. The reason: the body has already been interred in a grave set aside for natives, and to exhume it would be “contrary to public health regulations and the principles of native administration.”
Six Feet of the Country is a masterclass in understated horror. Gordimer does not show a lynching or a police beating; she shows a bureaucratic error. But in that error, she reveals the entire moral bankruptcy of Apartheid. The story’s power lies in its final, quiet tragedy: a family cannot find a body to bury because, in the eyes of the law, their loved one was never an individual at all. It remains one of Gordimer’s most devastating critiques of the banality of evil. six feet of the country by nadine gordimer summary
The narrator considers himself liberal and not overtly racist. Yet he remains emotionally detached from his Black workers. He doesn’t learn Lucas’s name until after he dies, and his efforts to claim the body are half-hearted. The title suggests that even land—the most personal connection to a country—is reduced to a tiny, grudgingly given plot. Desperate to help his employee—or perhaps to absolve