The narrator sees himself as "good" (he pays fair wages, gives medicine). Gordimer dismantles this by showing that individual kindness is meaningless when the entire legal system is designed to dehumanize Black people. The narrator cannot save Johannes because apartheid bureaucracy is a machine that grinds up bodies without names.
1956 (from the collection The Soft Voice of the Serpent ) six feet of the country by nadine gordimer summary
The title asks us: what does a person truly own? Money? Land? A passport? In the end, only the space where we lie down forever. And if even that is denied to you—if your body must be buried in a stranger’s field, under a smudged cross, without your ancestors—then you have lost everything. The narrator sees himself as "good" (he pays