Richard Rive. Shaun Viljoen
Jeanne Ellis, Mathilda Slabbert, Dawid de Villiers, Daniel Roux, Rita Barnard, Alastair Henderson and Dirk Klopper;
— ex-Hewat College of Education colleagues and friends who were generous with memories and always interested, in particular Marina and Carl Lotter, Jerome and Lilian Van Wyk, Gertrude Fester, Julia Isaacs and Tarnia van Zitters;
— Deborah Britzman at the University of York, Toronto, Canada, and Fernando Rosa Ribeiro at the University of Malaya;
— ex-students and friends Mark Espin and Deela Khan for reading early drafts;
— Berni Searle, Noel Daniels, Dawn Daniels, Rafiq Omar, Sharon Prins, Jerome Thomas, Zubeida Desai, Natasha Distiller, Pamela Nichols and Helen Struthers, who, through fair means or foul, tried to inspire and keep me going;
— Hosea and Ada Jaffe, and Mark Visagie and Daska Grandtnerova in Britain;
— family members who were interested in my work and supported me in various ways: Pierre Kay and Andy Kay and their families in Cape Town; Jean, Kenny, Marc and Ross Wentzel; Carol Abrahamse and Chris Abrahamse, all in Toronto; and the late Milly and Teddy Roberts, and their daughters Erica, Joanne and Barbara and their families in Brazil;
— student assistants Janine Loedolff, Rico Burnett, Ryan Weaver, Jonathan Maré, François Olivier, Vasti Calitz and Jim Jenkins, and administrative assistants Susan Matdat and Hilary Oostendorp;
— the Fundamentals Training Centre for technical support and help, especially the assistance of Hylton Bergh.
I am grateful to the most helpful staff at the following research institutions where I did much of the archival research: the District Six Museum and Sound Archive, particularly archivist Margaux Bergman; the Police Museum in Pretoria; Nelm, particularly Ann Torlesse; the Magdalen College Archive, particularly Robin Darwall-Smith; Christine Ferdinand at the Magdalen College library; the University of Cape Town administration records and archives; South Peninsula High School principal Brian Isaacs; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, in particular Timothy Young; the Schomburg Institute in Harlem, New York; the JS Gericke Library at the University of Stellenbosch; University of Cape Town Jagger Library and Archive; the St Helena Ar chive; and the South African National Library, Cape Town.
Financial assistance for this project was received from the National Research Foundation, the research offices of the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Stellenbosch, the dean of the Arts faculty and the department of English at the University of Stellenbosch, and the Tothill Foundation. The ex-dean and ex-deputy dean of the faculty of Arts and Social Science at the university of Stellenbosch, Hennie Kotzé and Marianna Visser, provided financial and moral support over a long decade.
Photographs
p. 6 Caledon Street, District Six
p. 99 An impish, delighted, camp Richard Rive, performing with Marjorie Wallace what seems to be a mock award ceremony, with George Hallett playing the audience
p. 101Richard Rive, graduation photograph, December 1962
p. 114James Matthews and Richard Rive at Rive’s Selous Court flat in Claremont, Cape Town, late 1960s
p. 161Richard Rive next to the Cecil Skotnes woodcut on the front door of his Windsor Park home.
p. 175Richard Rive presenting a paper at the conference on culture and resistance at the University of Botswana in July 1982
p. 193Richard Rive in 1988, backstage at the Hewat College of Education production of his penultimate novel, ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six
p. 215Richard Rive’s legacy: Basil Appollis (seated) and Shaun Viljoen at Artscape preparing for the dress rehearsal of ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six in 2001
Preface
In a commemorative article on Richard Rive in the Mail & Guardian Review on 7 February 1991, a year and a half after he was brutally murdered, Nadine Gordimer begins: ‘When someone of marked individuality dies and those who knew him give their impressions of him, a composite personality appears that did not exist simultaneously in life.’ This biography attempts to depict Rive as ‘a composite personality’ but from partial and selective vantage points. My account of Rive’s life assembles a multitude of voices and perspectives to compose a man who lived many lives simultaneously and who was a larger-than-life presence, an exceptional teller of stories who engendered not merely memories of encounters with him, but memories recast almost always as exceptional and entertaining stories.
This biography is primarily concerned with the way Rive embodied a vision of non-racialism in his often angry protest fiction, his literary scholarship, his interventions in education, sport and civil society, as well as in an inner life that battled contradiction between vocal assertiveness and tense silences. It tries to identify and delve into some of these strange but not atypical contradictions that pervaded his public and private personae, especially those related to colour and sexuality that have marked or masked his sense of self. Even while facets of this biography will be familiar to many readers, it is a portrait that I suspect not even the few who knew him well will recognise in all its aspects. Our experience of others is always only partial. ‘His cultivated urbanity,’ Gordimer continues in her tribute, ‘glossed over but couldn’t put out a flowing centre of warmth and kindness within’. Others could find at his centre only arrogance, self-centredness and abusiveness. Milton van Wyk, an admirer and younger friend of Rive’s, highlighted these contraries when he described how many responded to Rive: ‘Richard was a generous man if he liked you, scathing and arrogant if he didn’t. He enjoyed belittling people and loved attention, but there was a side to Richard very few people saw and that was of a man wallowing in loneliness.’1
Rive’s main body of work between 1954 and 1989 – twenty-five short stories, three plays, three novels, numerous critical articles on literature, three edited collections of African prose, an edited collection of Olive Schreiner’s letters, poems and a memoir – recounts, in a range of tones, the iniquity, brutality and absurdity of life under apartheid. His counter to apartheid backwardness was a strident and articulate egalitarianism that, in his later years, became somewhat muted and refracted through an introspective rather than a declamatory voice. Even his edition of Schreiner’s letters reflects his interest in a writer who opposed colonial oppression with an insistent and, in her context, radical liberalism. In some of his earlier short stories, the cry against injustice is too strained and obvious but, even here, his flair for telling a dramatic, clever and crafted story is clearly apparent.
District Six, where Rive was born and raised, was a colourful, cosmopolitan residential area adjacent to the centre of Cape Town. It was declared a ‘whites only’ area on 11 February 1966 by the Nationalist government, in terms of the 1950 Group Areas Act, and razed to the ground by the early 1970s. Just a decade later, it had become a symbol of all forced removals of people of colour throughout South Africa, an iconic space of contestation and memorialisation. It was symptomatic of a larger resurgence of resistance in South Africa and on the subcontinent after 1976, which resulted in the birth of new, defiant narratives reclaiming space, memory, rites of passage and return. Rive’s ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six was one such story and it played a significant role in exposing a new generation of younger readers to his work, ensuring his continued prominence as a South African writer and public intellectual nationally and internationally in the late 1980s and beyond.2
The novel ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six has been a popular prescribed text for high school learners at various grades in the Western Cape, as well as elsewhere in South Africa and in other countries. Nine years after his death, in 1998, the District Six Museum in Cape Town hosted a retrospective workshop on Richard Rive