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Chapter 2

It was the discovery of the writers of the American Harlem Renaissance – Rive mentions in particular Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer and Cedric Dover – that allowed the young Rive to find representations in literature that spoke more directly to his own dilemmas and contexts, and to break the illusion that books were for and about ‘White Folks’.⁵⁵ In ‘On Being a Black Writer in South Africa: A Personal Essay’, Rive claims to have first encountered the work of Langston Hughes when he read The Ways of White Folks at the age of twelve, a book he found on the shelves of the Hyman Liberman Institute Library in Muir Street, District Six: ‘A new world opened up. This was about me and depicted my frustrations and resentments in a world obsessed with colour.’⁵⁶ One senses here Rive’s epiphanic moment, a moment of self-discovery that changed his life as a writer and his very sense of self. It is also fascinating that Rive captures this turning point in an image that echoes the isolated Miranda’s excitement at glimpsing a ‘brave new world’ in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Unlike a writer such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who tried to effect a radical break from the English canon and its prevailing humanist assumptions in order to establish an independent African aesthetic, even attempting to move away from using the English language in creative work, Rive comfortably and consciously asserted his identity as an African writer, as he simultaneously claimed the great English literary tradition and the English language as his own.

The influence of the black American writers of the Harlem Renaissance was also refracted through the work of the writer who most directly influenced the whole Drum school of writers, Peter Abrahams. Mphahlele makes the point that the previous writing tradition by black authors located itself in folklore, in the oral past, in the (often Christian) allegory, the didactic and in the epic; it was with Thomas Mofolo, Herbert Dhlomo, RRR Dhlomo and AC Jordan that elements of realism were being favoured in work by black writers. Mphahlele continues:

Realism, however, really burst into full blossom for us when Peter Abrahams published Dark Testament (1940) … Abrahams acknowledged the influence of Afro-American writing on his own … Abrahams’ novels were to provide an inspiration for later fiction – that of the next decade.⁵⁷

Realism, a particular style of writing that represents place, time, people and things as they appear in everyday life, was attractive to black South African writers in the 1950s as the post-war, anti-colonial movements gained momentum around the world and defiance marked the anti-apartheid mood at home. Abrahams’s gritty realism, detailed depiction of local settings and autobiographically inspired content are narrative elements in the work of American Harlem Renaissance writers. In South Africa, Abrahams became a model for both black journalists and fiction writers of the 1950s. Rive, who always spoke of himself as a member of ‘the Protest School of writers’, acknowledges his debt to both Abrahams and Mphahlele: ‘There were many factors which gave momentum to [the Protest School] which had started hesitantly in the forties with Peter Abrahams and Ezekiel Mphahlele.’ He also talks about Abrahams in the following terms: ‘Abrahams was intent on showing social conflict in the broad, political sense of the word.’ Rive claims that Abrahams’s realism also derives from the social realist traditions fostered in the prose emanating from the Soviet Union. Rive found the stylistic conventions of realism – the insistence on authentic and detailed description of place and time – a mode of expression that enabled him to articulate an anti-racist, humanist position and, like Richard Wright, say, ‘Listen, White man’.⁵⁸ Apartheid impelled Rive to be a writer; even at a young age, he dedicated his talent and directed his anger to writing against apartheid – in the conventional sense of the word as socio-economic relations that dehumanised and destroyed lives but also, less commented on then and now, apartheid that infiltrated and scarred the innermost life.

Rive dates his first ‘raw, angry prose’ from about the time he gained his school-leaving Senior Certificate and, after the death of his mother, moved out of District Six to the abutting neighbourhood of Walmer Estate – to Flat 3, 17 Perth Road – a relatively middle-class area with larger, more modern housing often owned by the occupants rather than rented.⁵⁹ Walmer Estate was literally and in terms of social hierarchy higher up than the District. Rive was extremely glad to be out of the slum existence in which he had grown up. In Emergency, the narrator recounts Andrew’s feelings towards his home neighbourhood as a teenager in his final year at high school:

Andrew was determined to blot out the memory of the slums, the dirt, the poverty. He remembered the feeling of shame and humiliation he had experienced when Miriam had told him that Justin and Abe had come to pay their respects in Caledon Street after his mother had died. He was glad he had not been home. He wondered how they had reacted. Had they realised before that he lived in a slum?⁶⁰

Rive had made the first of many moves towards middle-class comfort and respectability, but later he noted that ‘paradoxically I also became more aware of my own position as an unenfranchised, Black non-citizen’.⁶¹ As his experience for the rest of his life was to prove, no matter what his financial, literary or educational achievements were, he remained an inferior being in the eyes of the authorities and of those who had internalised racist assumptions.

After Rive completed high school in 1947, he worked as a clerk at a furniture retail business, Phil Morkel, ‘but after two years,’ Harry Hendricks suspects, ‘he must have felt that business talk was too limited a field for him’.⁶² Perhaps he had already decided to bide his time, earning the money he needed to pay his way through college. In 1950 he registered at Hewat Training College, then in Roeland Street in District Six at the site of the present Harold Cressy High School, where he trained to become a high school English teacher. At Hewat, Rive met fellow students Ivan Abrahams and Albert Adams. Abrahams remembers first meeting Rive when he arrived as a first-year student at Hewat and Rive was in his second year. Rive was a keen athlete and became a champion 440-yard hurdler. Abrahams, also an avid athlete and runner at his old high school, Athlone High, helped to encourage Rive’s sporting career, even carrying his tog bag!⁶³ How Rive must have relished having a first-year student at his heels.

Abrahams also remembers Rive having a very impressive style of sprinting, using shorter rather than longer strides, which, he claims, Rive picked up from the Americans. The connection to the United States loomed large in his parentage, his sense of himself as a black writer and even as a sportsman. The connection to Britain was to the home of Englishness, to English literature and London as a nerve centre of African literature, and to the apotheosis of his educational achievements – his doctorate from no less than the great Oxford University. And, enmeshed with these transatlantic locations of belonging was the connection from the Cape to the north, to Johannesburg, to East and West Africa, from where he drew inspiration for his sense of being an African writer.

In 1951 Rive became a second-year representative on the editorial board of The Hewat Training College Magazine. The board was headed by Adams and the pieces of dialogue that Rive wrote for the magazine under the name ‘R.M. Rive’ are called ‘Variations on a Theme’, ‘With Apologies to William Shakespeare’, ‘With Apologies to Alan Paton’ and ‘With Apologies to H.W. Longfellow’ and are a far cry from the ‘angry prose’ of the short stories associated with Drum, which were to launch his name as a writer a few years later. But like parts of some of the Drum stories, these student pieces are marked by an obvious and sometimes grating derivativeness. The first piece, ‘Variations on a Theme’, imitates an absurdist exchange between Stranger and Tweedledee; the second imitates, in overblown Shakespearian diction, an exchange between Stranger and Tweedledadio; the third is a paternalistic exchange between Alan Paton and a black man (‘Umfundisi’ and ‘my child’); and the final one imitates the style of Longfellow, with dialogue between Stranger and Hiawatha. The young writer clearly wants to show, even show off, his knowledge of great writers. At the same time, there is an element of parody present, in that the pieces are so obviously flaunting the characteristic diction of each of the writers. This makes them somewhat funny but in a self-consciously learned, yet at the same time satirical fashion. Lastly, the piece on Paton includes a local, South African reference. From even this early stage as a writer, Rive was intent on engaging with his own conditions, with the work of South African writers, even though he was enchanted by the giants of the canon. This coterminous assertion of the local and the Euro-American persisted throughout his life. He was, he insisted, a citizen of the world.

According to Hendricks, Rive completed his two-year teacher training course at Hewat College by the end of 1951 and then ‘taught at Vasco High School for a year and during that year was one of the teachers instrumental in the formation [and] the founding of the Western Province Senior Schools Sports Union’.⁶⁴ After Vasco High, Rive joined the staff of South Peninsula High School, where he eventually became the head of the English department. At this stage he still lived in Walmer Estate, but he later moved to take up a room in Second Avenue, Grassy Park, ‘with an aggressively respectable family, who insisted on ignoring their even darker neighbours’, in order to be closer to South Peninsula, which was in the nearby suburb of Diep River.⁶⁵ At the start of his career at South Peninsula, he taught Latin and English, and his principal was Attie de Villiers – one of his former teachers at Trafalgar High.⁶⁶ This was a moment of great pride for Rive – acquiring a post at a highly respected school and having the honour of working with one of his own teacher-heroes. He taught at South Peninsula for almost two decades, until 1974, spending just a few of those years travelling, studying and working abroad. Towards the end of his time at South Peninsula, he did a short stint at Athlone High School, in 1973, while he was on leave from South Peninsula to complete his doctoral degree.

Together with fellow South Peninsula High colleagues such as Wilfred King, Rive helped to establish a reputation for the school as a top-performing contender in inter-school athletics championships. After a hard day of teaching English and Latin, he would spend time in the after-school hours, weekends and school holidays as an athletics coach and sports administrator. In addition, he remained an active member of the Western Province Senior Schools Sports Union and served on the executive committee of the body until his appointment at Hewat College in 1975. As if this was not enough to prove his sense of commitment to education and sport, he helped to form the South Peninsula Athletics Club in 1958 in order to consolidate and extend the work being done in sport at school level. With the formation in 1961 of the national umbrella body, the South African Senior School Sports Association (SASSSA), Rive became a national player in the field of athletics administration. Peter Meyer remembers:

Richard became a Western Province delegate to the South African Senior School Sports Association and served on the executive for many years. His wit, his irony, his sarcasm and eloquence in debate made him a fierce and feared opponent … He could analyse a situation to the point of being clinical and could formulate resolutions and motions very concisely and accurately. But he was sometimes very impatient and arrogant. He came across as somewhat of a braggart.⁶⁷

At the start of his career as a teacher, in 1952, while teaching full-time, Rive decided to register as a part-time student for his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Cape Town, majoring in English. He continued to write creatively in his spare time. Teaching, writing, organising sport and studying made their demands on his time and he eventually graduated with his BA more than ten years later, in 1962. His degree courses included Political Philosophy (II), History (II), Economics and Economic Geography. It was in one of the registration queues, in 1959, that Rive and writer Alf Wannenburgh first met.⁶⁸

The twenty-four-year-old Rive paints for Langston Hughes a detailed, fascinating picture of his typical day at this time when he begins to make a name for himself:

I awake at six in the morning at my home in Walmer Estate (a select Coloured area where Africans are seldom seen, but don’t blame me), and catch a bus to Cape Town Station. I am allowed to sit anywhere in the bus, but in Johannesburg I can only sit upstairs, three seats from the back and in Durban I will be allowed to sit where I like (because I’m Coloured) but Africans and Indians must sit upstairs.

At the station I board a section of the train where anyone may sit, but under no condition may I sit in the compartments labelled ‘Blankes Alleen’ as those are reserved for Whites. I have regular friends I meet on the train, Hepburn who is a Master of Arts and has a keen sense of humour, Bill Currie who is an outstanding actor but will never be able to act in National Companies because of his Colour and Arthur whom I suspect seeks solace in Roman Catholicism. Our conversation reaches a high standard, most probably far higher than most of our counterparts.

At Diep River I alight and walk 200 yards to pleasant South Peninsula High (a school for Coloured pre-University students) where the students are well-dressed and fed and come from better-class homes. Here I meet fellow lecturers who mostly belong to the Teachers’ League of South Africa (a militant teachers’ body now outlawed by the Department of Education). I lecture in Latin and English Literature and in addition take students for track athletics and swimming. After finishing here I attend lectures of the University of Cape Town (one of the two Universities in South Africa where no colour-bar is in operation) and am allowed in the same lecture room as white students. I should have mentioned that there is no academic segregation but a rigorous social segregation is observed, and I am not allowed to represent my University at Sports or functions attended by Apartheid Universities. After my lectures I usually go home and then to the Athletics Track which we are allowed to use on two nights a week when the whites do not use it. After this I either go to a political lecture, N.E.F. (New Era Fellowship, a militant Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) organisation) or M.Y.S. (Modern Youth Society, a group of radical youths with Leninist tendencies) or listen to the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra (no colour bar) or have the option of attending a Coloured cinema where a notice is usually displayed bearing the legend ‘Not for Natives (Africans) and children under 12!!!’ Or I watch the University Ballet in which Coloured Artists are allowed to perform or drama at the Little Th eatre. I belong to the University Library, Public Library and Educational Library (in any other Provinces there would be no library facilities for Non-Europeans whatsoever).

Were I an African, life would by no means be quite as pleasant. I would have to live in a location about 30 miles from Cape Town (Langa) earn a mere pittance and find a social if not economic bar to most cultural matters. I would also be open to abuse from both Whites and Coloureds. An African friend of mine, Mchigi, was almost knocked over by a Coloured skolly (hooligan) and told ‘Voetsek Kaffer!’ while in my company. Mchigi holds an M.A. degree in philosophy but is spurned as a Kaffer. The favourite term of abuse for Coloured people is ‘Hotnot’ or Hottentot. I have been called ‘Kafferboetie’ (friend of Kaffers), a frustrated intellectual, a perniculous [sic] influence, geleerde Hotnot (educated Hottentot), cynic, etc etc etc. During vacation I usually travel extensively through South Africa, and that is when the fun starts. It is then that I am made to feel my colour and see the system in operation.⁶⁹

This letter is remarkable for the manner in which it conveys a finely observed sense of how racial politics infiltrated and demeaned every aspect of the young man’s daily life; for what it reveals of the writer’s eye for class distinctions present within the more obvious divisions along lines of race; for his empathy with those like Mchigi who were even worse off than he was; for his strong sense of himself and his circle as cultured, urbane intellectuals and members of a radical resistance to racial oppression; for his ability to portray character in concise and vivid ways; and for his irrepressible wit and the humour that cannot help but mark his writing. Despite all the trials of being a black man in a white man’s country, this letter exudes a lust for life that persisted through most of his life.

It was about this time that Rive met Barney Desai, who was Cape Town editor of the Golden City Post, a national newspaper aimed at black readers. Desai commissioned Rive to do a short story, launching the long association Rive was to have with the popular press throughout his life. Rive’s memoir suggests this story was written in his ‘early twenties’, which implies a date prior to 1955, but the Golden City Post started only in 1955. The story appeared in its companion paper, Africa, in July 1955. Is this another indication of Rive’s penchant for making himself a little younger than he actually was? Or is it his unreliable memory for dates? Rive called his piece ‘My Sister Was a Playwhite’, a piece of journalism in the style of an agony/confessional column. It is narrated by a young, dark-skinned, coloured girl who tells the story of her fair-skinned sister, Lucille, who is encouraged by their also fair-skinned mother to live ‘as white’. It depicts the painful and humiliating divisions arising within the District Six family, where dark-skinned members are disowned, shamed and displaced, as a result of the aspirations of the mother and elder sister to exist as ‘white’ in a racially ordered society. The final paragraph reflects the didactic tone and mock confessional style: ‘I am writing this confession, distasteful as it is, because Lucille has asked me to do it to sound a word of warning to all Coloured persons who entertain a desire to “cross the line” and pass for White.’⁷⁰

There are obviously strong autobiographical elements to the story – the home in District Six, the divisive family attitudes to racial identity, the fair mother and dark father, the narrator being a top performer at St Mark’s School but getting no acknowledgement for her academic achievements from father or mother – and perhaps even the name Lucille hints at Rive’s own sister Lucy. These thinly disguised aspects from his own life would clearly embarrass his family if ever they read the story, which is probably why Rive chose to use a pseudonym as well as to change the gender of the narrator. The piece pre-dates any of the stories Rive composed for Drum shortly hereafter and is intriguing for the insights into what were fictionalised aspects of Rive’s childhood and the terrible strain that existed within the family. A dominant strand of Rive’s second novel, ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six, is already very evident in this, the earliest of his work set in District Six – the lyrical and deliberately celebratory recreation of the fabric of past life in a place constantly under threat of erasure. It begins a lifelong use of fictionalised autobiography in his creative work and a preoccupation with District Six as a setting for the exploration of the antithetical interconnectedness of the personal and the political, of nostalgia and despair, and of loss and hope. ‘My Sister Was a Playwhite’ is one of only two fictional works in which Rive uses a female narrator, the other being the short story ‘Mrs Janet September and the Siege of Sinton’ (published in 1987 in Contrast, two years before his death). Unlike the earnest confessional of ‘My Sister Was a Playwhite’, this last short story Rive wrote is told by a sixty-seven-year-old coloured woman, Janet September, who insists on being arrested along with protesting scholars from Sinton High School. The tale of this ‘oldest lady terrorist in Athlone’ is a hilarious, over-the-top and camp parody of the idiom of an older generation of coloured folk (like Rive himself).⁷¹ At the same time, the story celebrates fearless resistance to the police brutality of the dying apartheid state.

It was in Desai’s office, in 1955, that Rive again met artist Peter Clarke, and for the first time got to know photographer Lionel Oostendorp and writer James Matthews, all of whom were to become his very good friends. Clarke, writing to Langston Hughes in 1955, recalls a gathering of these friends, capturing the cultural earnestness and hunger for ideas of the young men at the time, as well as their love of a good party:

I saw Richard on Saturday, in fact I spent the afternoon at his home. He was having a party for a small group of us which included another writer friend James Matthews and photographer Lionel Oostendorp and one other friend (DRUM was responsible for our getting to know each other). It was quite a happy little affair and we spent the time eating and drinking and being merry while talking books and stories, art, poetry, music and that great old one and only subject, W-O-M-E-N … We listened to Beethoven as rendered by Malcuzynski, we listened to Borodin’s ‘Prince Igor’, Prokofiev, Smetana, excerpts from ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’ and John Gielgud reading T.S. Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ … There was Chopin and Delibes. Richard has a fine collection of records which make truly enjoyable listening.⁷²

Despite both growing up in a slum, Rive and Matthews had very different dispositions and asserted very different social class allegiances, and also had very different ideas about writing and intended audiences. Rive describes the bond and the differences that marked their friendship from the very start and all the way through their long and often affectionately acrimonious association. The differences between them were already apparent in their first encounter in the office of the Golden City Post in Corporation Street, District Six:

So here was James Matthews, whose stories I had read in the Weekend Argus; the telephone operator who wrote fiction in his spare time. I knew … that he came from a slum area above Bree Street, as beaten up as District Six, and that he had the merest rudiments of a secondary education. I had also heard he was a member of a powerful gang. I realised immediately that he saw in me everything he despised. I was not only Coloured middle class, but I spoke Coloured middle class and behaved Coloured middle class.⁷³

Matthews, in a tribute to Rive in 1989, makes a similar remark about the differences that marked the two men as writers and friends: ‘At times we were the opposite sides of a coin. My habitat the shebeens. Yours the drawing room of academia, our writing the strong bond.’⁷⁴

Rive embodied a not atypical paradox that was characteristic of the divided subjectivity of black intellectuals in the colonised world during the anti-colonial struggles for independence – being a part of, yet apart from; being black and engaged in struggle, iconic of and giving voice to the oppressed mass, yet being an educated, well-travelled writer and academic, living in fairly comfortable, middle-class conditions. Throughout his life Rive experienced the tension of such straddling of worlds; Matthews was far less wracked by the division, always living in a working-class area, spurning the comforts of suburbia.

It was not only writing that was the strong bond between Matthews and Rive, but also a shared conviction and the courage to speak out against ever-encroaching dictates of white minority rule. A fomenting spirit of defiance and cultural assertiveness marked the early to mid-1950s in South Africa. Th rough short stories, reportage and photography, Rive, Matthews and the writers associated with Drum asserted their humanity and cosmopolitanism in a fusion of African and American themes and styles as a retort to ruling-class attempts to dehumanise and tribalise. Drum, Michael Chapman says, ‘was part of the socialising process of the fifties: it helped to record and create the voices, images and values of a black urban culture at the precise moment that the Minister of Native Affairs, [Hendrik] Verwoerd, was setting out to render untenable any permanent African presence in the so-called “white” cities’.⁷⁵

One of Rive’s first short stories, ‘The Return’, written in 1953 or possibly even before, was entered for a Drum short story competition which was judged by, amongst others, Langston Hughes. He was asked to be a judge by the assistant editor of Drum, Henry Nxumalo. Hughes not only agreed but also offered to do a column about Drum in the Chicago Defender. Nxumalo sent Hughes the eight stories entered into the competition in December 1953. Rive’s story got second prize.⁷⁶ Hughes was very impressed with the stories and his exposure to young writers in South Africa gave birth to his idea for the publication of an anthology of African short stories. He began writing to various African writers about his idea, first testing it on Peter Abrahams in London, who promised to contribute stories. He also wrote to the young Rive very soon thereafter:

As one of the judges of Drum’s recent Short Story Contest it was my privilege to read your very beautiful short story, ‘The Return’. I am wondering if you have any more such stories or sketches that you could send me?

There is great interest at the moment in America in Africa, particularly South Africa, it being so much in the news these days. And the books of Alan Patton [sic] and Nadine Gordimer, among others, have been well received here. So, I have talked recently with one of the best American publishers about the possibility of an anthology of short stories by African writers, and he was most favorable to the idea, asking me to assemble such a collection, and promising to give it very careful consideration when gotten together. If accepted for publication, there would be the usual pro rata payment to each writer for his work used therein.

Should you have a half dozen or so more stories concerning the problems, inter-group relations, or folk life of the people, I would be most happy to see them as soon as you can conveniently send them to me for consideration in such an anthology. I liked the story of yours which I have very much and would want to include your work in the book. Peter Abrahams has promised to send me some of his stories from London, and we both feel that a very interesting volume can be assembled. I hope to hear from you soon.

With all good wishes to you for continued good writing,

Sincerely yours,

Langston Hughes⁷⁷

This letter from the great American poet and storyteller must have made a huge impact on the young South African writer. It marks the start of Rive’s writing career and reputation nationally and internationally. The letter is remarkably similar in formulation to one sent to Peter Clarke (who was using the pseudonym Peter Kumalo at the time for his short stories) as well as to several other African writers, such as Can Themba and Amos Tutuola. Clearly Hughes was not only spurring on African writers but was also driven by his vision for a pan-African anthology of writings. It was the start of an often very detailed and fascinating correspondence between Hughes and Rive that lasted thirteen years, until Hughes’s death on 22 May 1967. Hughes wrote to Peter Clarke, ‘Richard Rive … writes wonderful letters.’⁷⁸ The correspondence is particularly intense until around mid-1955, after which there is an unexplained gap until it is resumed in 1960. Interestingly, there is a similar gap of about three or four years in the correspondence between Hughes and Mphahlele and between Hughes and Clarke. Timothy Young, curator of the Hughes collection, cannot account for this gap.

Rive, replying to Hughes, is clearly inspired to respond to the hugely encouraging words but does so in a rather polite and formal tone:

I have received your very interesting and encouraging letter. I am afraid I do not conform to the pattern of starving-in-the-attic writer. I merely felt like it so I wrote. I have only three or four other short stories, but at the moment it is University vacation (I am at University of Cape Town) and mean to write, I assure you that within six weeks I will be able to send you at least half-a-dozen short stories following the theme of ‘The Return’.⁷⁹

‘The Return’ is the story of a nameless stranger whose ‘sallow complexion betrayed that he was not European’. The stranger returns to a small town in the Karoo where he is greeted with crude and foul racist insults by white youngsters and older folk in the main street. He finds refuge in the coloured location, where he seems vaguely familiar to the people, but where he also finds intense mistrust of ‘the kaffers’. Both white and coloured folk justify their bigotry in terms of Christian doctrine and when the stranger attempts to enter a whites-only church, he is bundled out by the church warden. The concluding paragraphs reveal that the stranger is in fact Christ returning, only to discover that in this racialised society ‘there was no understanding in their hearts’.⁸⁰