The Ultimate Safari

When all hope is lost for the three children in the short story, a hero arrives in the form of the children’s grandmother. The strong-willed, able-bodied grandmother in “The Ultimate Safari” saves her grandchildren even as she loses her husband, her home, and her belongings. Like the narrator, the grandmother remains unnamed.

She is the typical caregiver who continually supports others at great cost to herself. She is loyal to the grandchildren, the continuation of her family’s line, and their joint survival even as she sacrifices her own physical and emotional health. “As long as our bodies survive,” she says of the suffering (8). She lacks ambition beyond her caregiving and neglects her own self-care. At the height of her suffering, her breasts are exposed but empty as a symbol of her sacrifice and self-neglect and her inability to fully care for the children for whom she sacrifices.

Gordimer explores the human spirit through the grandmother character, depicting her as a tireless worker driven to help her grandchildren towards a better life. Hope, resolve and determination are her key characteristics, and she is the backbone of the story, the reason the children survive, and their sole hope. However, at the critical closure of the story, the grandmother admits that she herself has no hope, destabilizing the reader and highlighting the devastating effects of war.

The grandmother is the opposite of the little girl: aware of the horror of the war raging around them and the hopeless situation they face if they do not flee. Where the child is ignorant, the grandmother is informed. She represents the stark reality of the decisions and choices faced by a refugee. She is at once both a cork on the sea of an unforgiving history and a character who changes the protagonist’s destiny through her selfless caregiving.

The unnamed grandfather character is a foil to grandmother. He is diminutive, swimming in baggy clothes, nonverbal and weak. His only decision in the story—a moment of heightened dignity when he decides to relieve himself in privacy—results in his death. He remains static throughout the story, changing little from the first introduction to his wordless disappearance. He is not mourned or wept for, and no hymns are sung for him as they are sung for the mother who goes missing at the opening of the story. He arrives and departs the story without fanfare and without most noticing. His existence in the lives of his family members is inconsequential, and his disappearance, though traumatizing, is quickly forgotten.

The grandfather is a symbolic character: a depiction of what happens to a population beat down by an oppressive regime, unending war, famine, and chronic hopelessness. After the trek through Kruger Park, the girl notes that her older brother has begun to look like grandfather, representing another generation ruined by the war. The trials, starvation, and hopelessness leads to a state of inaction that replicates that of the grandfather.

The young narrator is too innocent to interpret the cause for the grandfather’s depleted appearance, though she notes that in the past he had livestock and a garden. This implies that in the past the grandfather was a more lively, robust, and opinionated character who had a quiet dignity that was taken from him by the war.