The Moment Before the Gun Went Off

The rifle represents the legacy of apartheid and the damage it causes to those affected by it. Handed down to Van der Vyver from his own father, the farmer doesn’t considered the gun dangerous. He figures that because “no one had used the rifle” since his father’s death, “it was not loaded” (Paragraph 9). This assumption corresponds to the potential logic of white South Africans: that the system of apartheid they inherited must not be dangerous, because it has existed untouched for so long. It is an accident that causes the rifle to fire and kill Lucas, nothing more. Van der Vyver sees this accident as an anomaly: he knows that he should not “ride with a loaded weapon in a vehicle” (Paragraph 9), as his father taught him, and he had not intended to; the shot was completely unintentional, caused by a pothole and Lucas banging the roof of the truck. For this reason, Lucas’s death is easier to justify as an accident, one in a long line of equal accidents that happen “every day of the week” (Paragraph 2). Nonetheless, the potential danger of the weapon turns into actual harm—much like apartheid policies.