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.
Literary Devices
Juxtaposition
Gordimer uses juxtaposition in the story to highlight stark differences between different situations, emphasizing the horrifying effects of war. The grandmother and grandfather represent opposing reactions to the dire situation that the rural population in Mozambique faces as civil war rages around them. Where one character has hope and perseveres, the other is hopeless and perishes.
Gordimer also juxtaposes the refugees with their foil: tourists. The story opens with an advertisement in London for a safari. The story depicts those who answered the ad and have come on safari bordering a war zone. The story concludes with a white film maker asking what will happen when the family goes back home. These characters represent ignorance and apathy. The refugees, on the other hand, are struggling and suffering in full view of the world, their pain apparent and visible in their appearance and situation. The contrast between the two is stark.
The children’s parents are both dead. The father was a fighter, the mother a nurturer, yet both perished. When the father was killed battling the “bandits,” the young girl says only that he never came back. Likewise, the mother disappears one day when she goes to the shop in search of oil. The girl speculates that “[p]erhaps she got the oil and someone knocked her down in the dark and took that oil from her” (1). While the father was fighting for security, the mother was fighting to provide.
Satire
In calling a story about a deadly escape from crushing civil war the “ultimate safari,” Gordimer is using satire to draw attention to the oppressive behaviors of tourists in Southern Africa and the contrast between their safety and that of the refugees. The title aims to provoke horror at the indifference of white South Africans and Europeans who simultaneously fund the conflict and ignore it.
Gordimer depicts the animals as calm and reasonable while the humans are savage or indifferent, drawing the reader’s attention back to the satirical question of which animals are on display in Kruger Park for the tourists to gawk at. The advertisement that opens the story claims that “The African Adventure Lives on!” (1). A caravan of hope-deprived refugees trudges past the tourists; the satire highlights the fact that tourists arrive for “adventure” while refugees wish for normalcy. Gordimer does not reveal what the tourists have seen in the park—only that the tourists are protected from the refugees and their problems by wardens and guards. She does, however, portray the girl seeing many animals such as the family of elephants. This satire therefore evokes pathos, as the story suggests that the innocent girl deserves to be enjoying “the ultimate safari” but is instead fleeing war.
Repetition
Through the utilization of repetition, Gordimer builds upon her thematic material by reminding readers what message she is trying to impart. One of the primary topics of the story is loss. By repeatedly highlighting what the girl has lost, the story never loses sight of that topic, nor of the crushing reality that loss presents to those escaping war.
The mother disappears when she leaves the house to get oil, according to the young narrator. Though they search, she is never found. The grandfather disappears when he leaves the group to defecate and does not return. Neither are found, no bodies are recovered, and there is no closure for those left behind is granted. With the repetition of disappearances, Gordimer highlights continuous abandonment, showing how the children feel about these characters going away.
Personification
Throughout the story animals are personified as Gordimer questions the notion of savagery versus civilization using one of the world’s largest nature reserves as the setting. In the opening lines the child describes the “bandits” as dogs. They hunt, kill, and chase “prey” without mercy. “If you meet them, they will kill you,” she says (1). Later, the girl describes a hyena as ashamed, giving human characteristics to the animal. She is, in fact, ashamed of herself and her miserable circumstances as she and others in the group consider begging for scraps.
The line between animals and humans is so blurred in the story, with animals personified and humans made animalistic, that it begs the question of which kingdom is more civilized after all: the humans who kill and are killed or the animals who kill for food.
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By Nadine Gordimer
