This early apartheid-era story by Nadine Gordimer highlights the white South African bureaucracy’s callousness and cultural insensitivity towards other races. While city-dwelling whites live in fear, the unnamed protagonist and his wife peacefully co-exist with their black farm workers on a small property just out of town. When the visiting brother of one of their workers dies, the authorities take the body away for autopsy. After paying £20 to have it returned for burial, they find a different body in the coffin. Major themes: racism and inequality (even in death!), change.
A second dimension to the plot is the stressed relationship between the protagonist and his wife: We bought our place to change something in ourselves… you seem to rattle about so much within a marriage like ours. The farm hasn’t managed that for us. Their declining marriage is a metaphor for the changes occurring in South African society at the time. The story is set in the early 1950s as segregation was being formalized into law. The protagonist gloats: In the country, there is a lingering remnant of the pre-transitional stage; our relationship with the blacks is almost feudal. Wrong, I suppose, obsolete, but more comfortable all around. Interestingly, any suggestion that he was more enlightened than the government or really understood the needs and feelings of his workers is shattered in the final paragraph. In giving the dead man’s father a cast-off suit for the winter, he cold-heartedly states that the old man will return home better off than he had come.
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