"Six Feet of the Country" is set on a farm near Johannesburg, South Africa, during the apartheid era. The story is narrated by a well-meaning but somewhat detached white farmer who employs several Black workers. The central conflict arises when one of the workers, a young man named Petrus, approaches the farmer with a request: his father has died unexpectedly.
In accordance with their rural traditions, the family wants to bury the old man properly on the farm. They ask the farmer for permission to use a piece of land—just "six feet of the country"—for the grave. The farmer, sympathetic but constrained by his own worldview, agrees.
However, the situation quickly becomes entangled in the rigid bureaucracy of the apartheid state. Because the deceased was not legally authorized to be on the farm, the white authorities intervene. The police demand a post-mortem, forcing the family to exhume the body. When the body is finally released after the autopsy, it has been handled disrespectfully, wrapped in a plastic bag rather than the traditional shroud.
The climax of the story occurs when the farmer attempts to retrieve the body from the city morgue. He arrives too late; the morgue has closed for the weekend. By the time the body is finally returned to the farm, decay has set in. The family is forced to bury a corpse that has been violated by the state and delayed by the farmer’s inability to navigate the system effectively. The story ends with the narrator reflecting on the tragedy, realizing that his sympathy was useless against the crushing weight of a system that denies basic human dignity.
The story is a masterclass in showing how apartheid works not only through overt violence but through bureaucracy. Pass laws, native commissioners, medical officers, public health regulations—these impersonal forces reduce a man’s deeply felt cultural and familial need (to bury his brother at home) into a series of administrative obstacles. The state does not need to be cruel to the narrator or Petrus; it simply needs to be indifferent. The final letter from the Secretary for Native Affairs is the perfect symbol of this: a typed, official, polite, and absolute denial of human dignity. six feet of the country by nadine gordimer summary
Gordimer’s story is short, but it lingers in the mind. It forces the reader to see how systemic injustice operates in the smallest details of life—and death. It challenges the reader to ask: In a society built on inequality, can genuine human connection ever truly exist?
The narrator ends the story looking at the receipt, holding the physical evidence of the transaction. He has "helped," yet he remains fundamentally separate from the grief of the people who work for him. He owns the farm, but they only own those six feet of earth.
Have you read "Six Feet of the Country"? What are your thoughts on Gordimer’s portrayal of the "well-meaning" narrator? Let me know in the comments.
Six Feet of the Country " (1956) by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer is a short story set during South Africa's "Six Feet of the Country" is set on
era. It explores the profound disconnect between white landowners and their Black laborers through a bureaucratic disaster surrounding a funeral. SuperSummary Plot Summary The Setting : An unnamed white narrator and his wife,
, move from Johannesburg to a farm ten miles outside the city, hoping the rural lifestyle will repair their strained marriage. The Incident : One night, their farmhand reveals that his brother—an illegal immigrant from
(modern Zimbabwe)—has died in a worker's hut from illness. The Conflict
: Authorities take the body for an autopsy. Petrus and his family scrape together their meager savings for a proper burial. The Climax The story is a masterclass in showing how
: When the coffin is returned for the funeral, the family discovers the authorities have sent the wrong body The Resolution
: Despite the narrator's attempts to use his "white privilege" to fix the error, the bureaucracy is indifferent. The original body is never found, leaving the family with nothing but a "complete waste" of money and a nameless grave for a stranger. SuperSummary Key Characters
Nadine Gordimer’s short story “Six Feet of the Country” (first published 1956) explores how apartheid-era South African racial hierarchies deform private life, grief, and human dignity. Set on a farm where a Black laborer’s sudden death confronts a white Afrikaner couple with institutionalized expectations and personal anxieties, the story compresses political critique, psychological realism, and moral ambiguity into a tightly controlled narrative. This paper analyzes Gordimer’s thematic concerns, narrative techniques, character dynamics, symbolism, and ethical implications, arguing that the story stages both a critique of apartheid’s social machinery and a probe into how systemic injustice becomes internalized and reproduced by ordinary people.
Petrus comes to the narrator again. This time, his request is different. He explains that in his tribal custom (the story vaguely suggests he is Xhosa or a similar group), it is essential for a person to be buried in the soil of his home, not in a strange, foreign place like the town’s pauper’s grave. The family has sent money from the reserves. Petrus wants to retrieve Johannes’s body—or at least have it exhumed—so that it can be transported back home for a proper burial. All he needs is the narrator’s help: a letter, a car, a voice of authority.
The narrator, still feeling a mix of guilt and annoyance, reluctantly agrees to help. What follows is a Kafkaesque journey through the bureaucratic labyrinth of apartheid South Africa.
The narrator returns to Petrus with the bad news. He tries to explain the medical officer’s reasoning. Petrus listens silently, his face expressionless. Then he says, quietly, “He said he would come back. He said he would not stay here.” Petrus is referring to a promise Johannes made before he died—a promise to return home.