A reading of Nadine Gordimer’s short story Country Lovers 1980 reveals that the narrative is about a girl who has an intimate relationship with a white man but due to the situation that the event take place in, she is not a candidate for a long-term relationship with him. For intimate relationships across the colour line in apartheid South Africa were considered immoral and were forbidden. The man does not pursue marriage with her, she becomes his secret girlfriend and when she falls pregnant with his baby he takes the life of their baby away as a way of removing the evidence of what took place between the two of them. A careful reading shows that Thebedi and Paulus relationship’s evolution from a childhood friendship across colour lines as well as master servant-relation to that of secret lovers is ultimately destroyed by the very barriers it seem to elude from the onset.

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