: Re: Is the ambiguity in my story the salt which makes it tasty or just plain frustrating? Because this story is quite ambiguous in relation to the setting and also the main character's gender,

This is of course my own, subjective opinion, but...

The gender ambiguity changes about nothing. It has no bearing on the story, and so no impact - a redundant undefined variable.

The nationality of the character - if you skipped the 'black' it would be a salt, turning a specific racial struggle into a general, universal one, with a bearing all of us could identify with. "What if it were us?" But this way, the key element - who vs whom - is defined (frustratingly far into the story) and the salt is lost.

The ambiguity of location - This is frustrating to no end. As you paint a picture of the location in your head, and must backtrack and change elements because no, it's not colonial period, there are semi-auto guns, change it to a modern times backwater settlement. No, it's not a poor backwater settlement, they have a bunch of cars; change it into a moderately advanced city. And the violent discrimination of the blacks is not a trend of current day, so it's not modern day, but some somewhat recent past, change models and style of cars. No, not a rampartly militarized country like most of Africa, the gathered are all unarmed. And the thrown in bits of historical facts break it up even further without adding much. The location requires an exposure. Let us see the place, instead of piecing it from our imagination then invalidating the image piece by piece. That's frustrating.

Summarizing: if you keep an important piece of exposure from the readers, keep it hidden until the end (either forever or just until last lines before the end if it's to be a surprise shattering the image we had built). If you want it to be known, make it known as soon as it bears any importance to the story, before we are forced to build a mental image from insufficient data. Do not dribble pieces of information in a story explicitly written. It's a valid technique in a criminal, where the explicit story (investigation) is all about piecing together the implicit story (the crime) from ambiguous details painstakingly gathered. It's not valid if the story itself is not implicit.

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