29 pages • 58 minutes read
Nadine GordimerThe Ultimate Safari
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Empathy for the Refugee Experience
Gordimer visited a refugee camp on the border of South Africa and Mozambique, spurring her interest in cross-border relations. She witnessed the effects of her government’s actions on their neighbors as she toured the camp and saw the impact on a personal level. This experience inspired “The Ultimate Safari,” a story that focuses not on large geopolitical movements but their impact on the individual.
“The Ultimate Safari” follows one family’s escape from war to relative safety in South Africa. A refugee is one who flees persecution or armed conflict and is different from a migrant in that migrants are relocating for economic benefit. While the grandmother finds employment in South Africa in the conclusion of the story, it was not her aim when running from the “bandits.”
The grandmother makes the wrenching decision to abandon her home, her village, and her community to travel to safety with her grandchildren. She sacrifices much along the way, both the ephemeral and the permanent, losing her sense of security, her spouse, and her identity. “The Ultimate Safari” is told from the vantage point of a child, and the grandmother’s struggle is delivered in snippets of brutal honesty.
In the story, dignity is a luxury of those with security. In their most desperate moment, the grandmother stands with wide legs, breasts bare, and abandons her husband to save her grandchildren. She is exposed and vulnerable, and yet at that moment she is making the choice, again, to survive. She chooses life, even if it is a hard, vulnerable life.
The story asks readers to consider the circumstances that bring refugees to their land. Though deeply critical of the South African government at the time, Gordimer does not attack the government directly, instead allowing the refugee’s journey to lead the reader towards empathy and understanding rather than judgement and fear.
The Overlooked Labor of Women in Wartime
When war breaks out it is traditionally the men who are called to respond. In “The Ultimate Safari,” the children’s father has disappeared while fighting the bandits. The grandfather neither speaks or acts out against the bandits or the government. This leaves the women to care for the home and the children and to provide. The story hence suggests that women do labor that is overlooked but significant during wartime.
The grandmother is representative of the expanded role of women during war and the burden of sacrifice it places on them. She ensures that her family safely escapes the war and arrives at a refugee camp. Once there, she could relinquish the children to the system and rest. Instead, she weave mats for them to sleep on, gets a job hauling bricks at a nearby construction site, and earns enough money to buy the children their first luxury item: shoes. She is a caregiver and provider. Gordimer portrays domestic battles through an image of grandmother with bricks on her head, arms flexed, and a determined stare.
Likewise, the young narrator, though only 11 by the story’s conclusion, has become a caretaker. She carries her infant brother through Kruger Park on their escape from Mozambique. She helps to feed and care for him at the refugee camp. She worries about his development and his future. These actions portray adultification of a young girl because of war. She takes on the role of caregiver because that role needs to be filled.
The other women in the story are nurses, camp laborers, and journalists. This wide range of occupations essentially serve a similar purpose: that is, to care for and provide for the population. The nurses and camp laborers offer sustenance, order, medical care, and hope. The journalist brings their story to a wider audience, offering hope for intervention and aid. These tertiary female characters have put themselves at risk to care for and provide for a population in need, demonstrating that the role of women in war is often a chosen, self-appointed burden.
How Ignorance and Apathy Lead to Subjugation
Gordimer, a writer and political activist, wrote of white apathy in many of her works, especially in relation to apartheid in South Africa. Apathy implies a lack of concern while ignorance implies a lack of knowledge. As a writer, Gordimer chipped away at ignorance. “The Ultimate Safari” is itself an act of informing readers about the refugee experience and the effects of South Africa’s destabilization policies. The story resists ignorance and apathy because such stances lead to subjugation.
Characters in the story represent both ignorance and apathy in various degrees. In the context of the story of war, loss, and escape that follows, the advertisement that opens the book is portrayed as insensitive; Gordimer’s stark juxtaposition of the advertisement with the story’s events is accusatory. Here, Gordimer is depicting the European population as ignorant and implying that the tour operators are apathetic about the war, the refugees who sneak past their tourist caravans in the night, and the deaths that occur in the park out of sight of their clients. This ignorance and apathy lead to the subjugation of the refugees in the park.
There are characters in the story who witness the suffering and do not act because they, too, would become refugees if they did. The narrator says, “[t]he guide told us that we must keep out of the way of our people who worked in the Kruger Park; if they helped us they would lose their work” (9). These are Black South Africans who are aware of the refugees in the park. They are not ignorant. Later in the story, readers learn that the area of South Africa where they have camped is part of the same historical tribe as their village in Mozambique, cut by colonial borders. The characters acknowledge that “there was no fence that kills you, there was no Kruger Park between them and us, we were the same people under our own king” (14). In this village the children attend the local school and work can be found. Gordimer hence explores apathy itself as a form of subjugation; apartheid has oppressed the Black population of South Africa to the point that they are forced into apathy to keep their livelihoods. The result of intervention in Kruger Park would be the loss of their own security, in essence a replication of the dire circumstances of the refugees.
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