The Ultimate Safari

“The Ultimate Safari” is a postcolonial short story in the tradition of realism with facts delivered in little embellishment. Gordimer achieves this effect by using a child as the narrator. A child is both unreliable and chronically honest. The little girl can speak of murder and disappearances bluntly without offering cause and effect or context. The use of an innocent child as narrator highlights the impact of decisions made by white colonial-minded powerbrokers thousands of miles away in South Africa’s minority-ruled government.

Gordimer explores the universality of human suffering and, on the opposing side, the capacity for indifference to suffering. Though the story depicts a specific refugee family’s journey from their war-torn homeland to a refugee camp, the characters in the story are deliberately vague to encourage the reader to see themselves in the characters and generate Empathy for the Refugee Experience. The characters remain unnamed, described only in minimal detail, and utilize their relationships to one another as the foundational means of identification. They are not specific to the crisis in Mozambique but representative of what could become of anyone in a war zone.