Six Feet Of The Country By Nadine Gordimer Summary -
The story is narrated by a white man who, with his wife, runs a small trading store and a piece of land just outside a major city (implied to be Johannesburg). They have recently moved there from the city, seeking a quieter life, and employ several Black workers.
The central conflict begins when one of their workers, a young man named Petrus, asks for permission to bring his younger brother, Lucas, from the countryside to live on the property. The narrator reluctantly agrees. However, Lucas is restless and rebellious. He frequently leaves the property without permission, which violates the strict pass laws of apartheid that control Black movement.
One morning, the narrator learns that Lucas has disappeared. Days later, a neighbor informs him that Lucas’s body has been found by the roadside. He was likely picked up by police for not having his passbook, died in custody (possibly from a beating), and his body was dumped. six feet of the country by nadine gordimer summary
The narrator, driven by a sense of duty and mild guilt, goes to the city morgue to claim the body so it can be buried properly by Petrus and the family. But he is met with an impenetrable bureaucracy. The officials refuse to release the body without a permit from the pass office. He travels from office to office, facing indifference, rudeness, and paperwork. The pass office officials, who are white, care only about the legal status of Lucas’s pass, not about his death or the family’s grief.
After days of futile effort, the narrator finally obtains permission—only to be told that the body has already been buried in a pauper’s grave on state land, a common fate for unclaimed Black bodies. The story is narrated by a white man
The climax is deeply ironic and tragic. The narrator, defeated, returns and tells Petrus. He offers to buy a headstone for the unmarked pauper’s grave, but Petrus declines. Instead, Petrus asks for something else: “Six feet of your ground… to bury my brother.” He wants a proper family grave on the land where Lucas lived and died.
The narrator agrees. In the final lines, he realizes that Lucas, who had tried to escape the white man’s land, is now permanently buried in it. The narrator reflects: “But he had got his six feet of the country… and he was not going to give it back.” The narrator reluctantly agrees
Initially, the narrator is sympathetic. He agrees to help, viewing it as a gesture of goodwill. However, he quickly discovers that the state does not treat the bodies of poor Black laborers with the same respect as white citizens.
To retrieve the body from the morgue, the family needs a coffin. Furthermore, the government requires a payment of £20—a significant sum at the time—to release the body. The workers pool their meager wages, and the narrator contributes a few pounds to make up the difference. They purchase a cheap coffin and a hearse.
When the body arrives, another tragedy strikes. Due to bureaucratic bungling and the carelessness of the white authorities, the body is barely recognizable. It has been mishandled, and the young man’s face is disfigured. For the family, this is a devastating blow; the ritual of washing and honoring the body is essential for a good death.
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.