The story is narrated by a white man who, with his wife Lerice, runs a small "holding"—a rural plot of land outside Johannesburg. They have recently moved from the city, seeking a simpler life. Their primary interaction with the black population is through their servants, particularly their houseboy, Petrus.
The narrator’s journey is one of forced political awakening. Initially, he is a typical liberal white South African: irritated by the demands of his black servants, dismissive of Lerice’s softer sympathies, and convinced that he is a fair man. He does not see himself as a racist. However, as he fights the bureaucracy, he is forced to confront his own powerlessness. He cannot buy, bribe, or argue his way past the law. For the first time, he experiences a fraction of the dehumanization that black South Africans live with daily. six feet of the country by nadine gordimer summary
The title, Six Feet of the Country , is bitterly ironic. To the narrator, "six feet" is a trivial amount of land, a small patch on his property he is willing to give. But under apartheid, that six feet is not his to give. The state owns the very geography of death. The story reveals how racial segregation extends beyond housing, work, and social life to the final resting place. The story is narrated by a white man
In a final, bitter compromise, the narrator pays to have the body exhumed from a temporary grave (where Petrus had secretly buried it overnight) and transported to the state-mandated cemetery. The story closes with the narrator and Lerice visiting the "native location." They find a vast, barren, and unmarked field of graves. They cannot find Petrus’s brother’s grave. All they see is an anonymous stretch of earth, identical for every black person. The narrator realizes that his battle was never about this one man, but about the principle of dignity—a principle the state systematically obliterates. The narrator’s journey is one of forced political
One morning, Petrus’s younger brother, who has been visiting illegally from the countryside, falls ill. Despite the narrator’s reluctant drive to fetch medicine, the brother dies of pneumonia that night. The tragedy, however, is only the beginning. The narrator learns that the body must be reported to the authorities, and because the brother was not a registered resident of the urban area, the law requires that he be buried in a designated "location" for black people—a distant, overcrowded, and unfamiliar cemetery.
What follows is a Kafkaesque nightmare of red tape. The white bureaucrats are polite but immovable. The narrator learns that it is illegal to bury a black person on white-owned land. He is shuttled from one office to another—the pass office, the health department, the non-European affairs department. Each official explains the regulations with clinical detachment: the body must go to the "native cemetery." The narrator argues, pleads, and even offers bribes. He discovers that the "six feet of the country" he owns is not his to give. The land is his property, but its use is governed by the racial geography of apartheid.
Nadine Gordimer’s short story, Six Feet of the Country , is a masterclass in minimalist political commentary. Set in apartheid-era South Africa, the story uses a deceptively simple domestic incident—the death of a black farm worker—to expose the vast, uncrossable chasm between white privilege and black suffering. Through the first-person narration of a white Jewish immigrant named Lerice, Gordimer demonstrates how even well-meaning white South Africans are complicit in a system that reduces human beings to bureaucratic obstacles and property. This essay provides a summary of the plot and then unpacks the story’s central metaphor: the desperate need for physical space to bury one’s dead, and the state’s cold denial of even that.