"Six Feet of the Country" remains a foundational text in post-colonial literature. Nadine Gordimer masterfully uses a quiet domestic setting to critique a monstrous political regime. The story reveals that under state-sponsored racism, even death is segregated, and the moral fabric of the entire nation is ultimately corrupted.
The story is a powerful exploration of how apartheid capitalism commodified Black life. The boy's journey from Rhodesia to Johannesburg was in search of work, of being a human commodity for labor. In death, his body is treated as a thing to be processed. The twenty-pound fee for the exhumation reduces a sacred family ritual to a financial transaction. The narrator's own thinking is tainted by this worldview, as he initially balks at the fee, mentally comparing it to the cost of the boy's medical treatment when he was alive. The final, horrifying image of the body possibly ending up as "layers of muscle and strings of nerve" in a medical school is the ultimate expression of this dehumanization: the reduction of a person to raw material. six feet of the country by nadine gordimer summary
