Once Upon a Time

“Once Upon a Time” is a story about fear set during apartheid in South Africa. Its narrator uses a fearful experience of her own to segue into a parable about a family whose fear of violence causes them to take extreme measures that end in their son being severely hurt, and possibly dying. The narrator imagines that someone has broken into her house, inflating a sound into an imaginary person. Even though the narrator does not see an intruder, she feels like a victim when she recalls stories about recent violent events. Similarly, the family the narrator describes in her story amplifies its own fears. The family inflates news of nearby protests and burglaries into racist alarm over imaginary Black intruders into white homes, even though the protests are so far away that the family never sees them.

The narrator mentions that the people in the townships beyond the suburb are “of another colour” than the family. Given the political and social situation in South Africa at that time, one can infer that the narrator and the family in the story are white while the housemaid, gardener, intruders, and rioters are Black. During apartheid, roughly 75% of South Africans were Black people of many ethnicities, including those indigenous to the region. Roughly 10-15% of South Africans were white. The white minority labeled the majority of the population Black and “Coloured,” a term used to designate people who had a Black parent and a white parent, Asian people, and some members of South African nations whose skin tones were considered to be between Black and white.

Apartheid law explains the spatial organization of the story into opposition between insides and outsides: the white suburb opposed to the Black townships, and the house and yard opposed to everything beyond them. There was an extreme wealth gap between white and Black South Africans during apartheid, which Gordimer alludes to in her references to the gated suburbs, where the white characters live, and to the townships—the segregated and impoverished sections outside the city where the apartheid government required Black South Africans to live. The only Black people the family sees are domestic workers, who can come to the house only because the maid’s and the gardener’s work passes give them permission to leave the township and ride the bus to the suburb.

Gordimer relies on the reader’s knowledge of such apartheid laws—like those requiring Black citizens to carry passports to travel within their own country—to fill in parts of the story that the narrator leaves unexplained. The “riots,” for example, are anti-apartheid protests for political freedom. Though the narrator does not specify this in the story, readers can infer it because in the mid-1980s, when the story likely takes place, township uprisings corresponding to the description of the “riots” occurred all over the country. By establishing this context, Gordimer highlights the irony of the white family displaying extreme concern for its own safety at a time when Black South Africans were seeking safety from much more violent and frightening apartheid conditions.

Gordimer satirizes the white family’s fear by using hyperbole to describe the high number of burglaries in the suburb. Her story portrays the family’s desire for home security as reasonable, as a logical reaction where burglaries are prevalent. However, the suburban residents’ fear of the other takes over their lives and cages them in more than it keeps burglars out. The secondary narrative of the township uprisings suggests, moreover, that deeper, racist fears motivate the family members and their neighbors to barricade themselves against forces of change that are inevitable in their country. The moral to the cautionary fairy tale suggests that allowing one’s fear to balloon, and to define structures like segregation and racial hierarchies, does not keep one safe; in fact, it creates danger and violence of its own.