Six Feet Of The Country By Nadine Gordimer Summary _top_ Jun 2026

The narrator feels guilt, but it is a self-centered guilt. He wants to help Petrus not out of love for Johannes, but to soothe his own conscience for having refused the pass. Throughout the quest, the narrator and Petrus never truly communicate. They speak different languages not only literally but emotionally. When Petrus says, “He said he would come back,” the narrator hears a sad saying. But for Petrus, it is a broken covenant—a failure of the world to respect even the last wish of a dying man.

The title, “Six Feet of the Country,” is bitterly ironic. The narrator owns six miles of the country—land he uses for profit. Petrus’s family asks for only six feet of it—a grave. The state denies even that. In a deeper sense, the country does not belong to Johannes or Petrus. Their real home is the “reserves,” the impoverished, overcrowded Bantustans to which the apartheid state confined black people. The story argues that for a black South African, the entire country is a foreign land, except for the six feet of ancestral soil in which one hopes to be buried. six feet of the country by nadine gordimer summary

“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. The narrator feels guilt, but it is a self-centered guilt

The narrator considers himself a "good" white man (he runs a store for black people, employs them). He believes he has nothing to do with Apartheid’s cruelty. Yet, his refusal to grant the simple request for a coffin and transport directly leads to the tragedy. Gordimer shows that complicity is not just active cruelty, but also the failure to see others as fully human. They speak different languages not only literally but

The story is narrated by a white, liberal South African couple who run a small trading store and transport business near a rural "location" (a segregated settlement for Black Africans). They live on a small piece of land they bought from the government, but they feel disconnected from the landscape and the people.

This comfortable distance is shattered when one of the workers, a young man named Petrus, approaches the narrator with a request. Petrus’s brother has recently arrived from the rural areas (likely Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) to work on the gold mines. He contracted pneumonia and died in a government hospital.