Six Feet of the Country

The story examines the apartheid’s psychological manipulations, specifically in a rural setting. The white characters initially believe they have escaped the racial biases and white supremacy of their contemporary Johannesburg; they keep their distance from their indigenous employees, who are free to work on their own and have no fear of their white employers. The protagonist views them as “other” but not necessarily lesser, and his wife Lerice is sympathetic toward them in a way uncharacteristic of white South Africans at the time. These two white characters are not fully corrupted by the city’s apartheid ethos and are willing to coexist with the Black characters, but this “pretransitional” era will eventually fall prey to the city’s racism, even as the protagonist ends up fighting against the encroachment.

The employees’ safety is limited to their white employers; they know Lerice can help their children if they fall ill, but because the protagonist will have to deal with authority beyond his control if he discovers Petrus’s brother, the employees keep the young man’s presence a secret so that urban society cannot get involved. Indeed, the employees, mainly Petrus, slowly learn that their friendly rural employers cannot overcome the urban apartheid apathy. The protagonist intuits that Petrus believes “white men can have everything, can do anything” (13), but the apartheid officials overpower even their white employer. The apartheid’s psychological manipulation eventually invades even the rural countryside that initially promised, to the protagonist, a refuge from the city’s racism: Instead of its customarily civil racial coexistence, the rural setting now approaches a more imbalanced dynamic wherein one group subjugates the other, who merely wishes to honor their dead and grieve with dignity. What little cultural freedom the Black characters have, in their grief, is mediated by the white authorities presiding over the deceased’s body. The funeral marks a climax in racial power imbalance, and the body’s misplacement demonstrates the apartheid authority’s apathy toward the “inferior” population.

Though he harbors his own contempt for the apartheid’s dehumanizing bureaucracy and is disgusted at the idea of a “master-race theory,” even the protagonist exhibits a veiled arrogance. When his employees seek his help, his begrudging attitude suggests an unconscious doubt over how much he should do for his employees if they are, after all, “inferior.” He makes little effort to understand their desire for a funeral and thinks the expenses are a “waste” of money; he cannot (or will not) imagine wanting to spend precious resources honoring the dead of his employees. Likewise, he is dismissive toward his wife and is chronically annoyed by how deeply she cares about things in general. It is only as he spends more time fighting with the mortuary that his empathy shows signs of deepening, and his viewpoint becomes somewhat less rigid.

The story has darkly comic elements, stemming partly from the irony of the narrator’s perspective for the better part of the narrative: His complacent belief in his own insightfulness is at odds with the actuality of his ignorance. Even the funeral, with its morbid reversal and ensuing panic, has an almost slapstick quality in ironic discordance with the grave reality of the situation. Nevertheless, the story also has a tragic tenor, even apart from the abject injustices portrayed. Though his transformation is not dramatic, the protagonist’s empathy incrementally deepens, his tone changing as he contends with the mortuary staff—his effort becomes a crusade, and he calls it “a matter of principle” (19)—but he ends the story dispirited and with only a different cynicism than when he began. His transformation is twofold: As he increasingly registers the injustice against his employees, he increasingly loses hope for their plight against the mortuary’s callousness and ineptitude. When the protagonist finally laments, “So the whole thing was a complete waste” (20), the meaning of “waste” is now changed. The word no longer describes the funeral expenses; it denotes the perceived futility of seeking justice within a corrupt, colonialistic system.