There are disappointingly few details about Rive’s school days at Trafalgar High, where he matriculated in 1947. The only mention of the school that played a seminal role in developing his thought and politics is in a chapter of Writing Black called ‘Growing Up’:
Much of what I wanted to know about myself I later found out in books written by people who were able to articulate their experiences better than I ever could. From my primary school days at St Marks and Trafalgar Junior I read avidly and indiscriminately anything I could lay my eyes on. By the time I was at Trafalgar High my reading was partially to escape from the realities of the deprivation surrounding me.45
In the photograph from his high school days, Rive appears reticent, reserved, almost shy, hands just touching the shoulders of his classmate kneeling in front of him. Kneeling just to the left of Rive, in the centre, is my father, Ian Viljoen. This was the most uncanny moment of my research into Rive’s life. It was only sometime after I came across this photograph that I recognised my father. I had no idea he had been in the same class as Rive and he had died long before I embarked on this research. Julia Williams, the young woman kneeling on the far left, married Ivan Abrahams, who was a fellow student with Rive at Hewat College and later a colleague at the college (it was she who helped to compile information about this photograph in June 2012). Abu Desai, standing on the far right, became vice-rector at Hewat College while Rive lectured there. (How segregation and apartheid created these intimately connected colour-coded villages within the city!) The mathematics teacher, Mr Roux, stands at the centre.
Richard Rive (back row, fifth from the right) with some of his Standard 10 classmates at Trafalgar High in 1947 (photographer: unknown) Reprinted by permission of UCT Libraries (BC1309: Richard Rive Papers. A3. Photograph of the matric class of Trafalgar High, 1947)
Rive’s high school years coincided with the reign and fall of Nazism and the renewed vigour of worldwide debate about freedom, equality, democracy and national independence. His years at Trafalgar High were to be formative intellectually and ideologically. Dudley captures the decisive intellectual influence the school had on Rive’s outlook on life:
At Trafalgar a climate and ethos had been created which was unequalled in any institution for the oppressed at that time. For among the teachers were distinguished scholars like Ben Kies, Jack Meltzer, Suleiman (Solly) Idros, George Meisenheimer, Cynthia Fischer and the equally distinguished science teacher, H.N. Pienaar. This generation of teachers … were the articulate bearers of a new outlook in education, a team dedicated to excellence and selfless in their service to their pupils … It is here where the teachers brought into the classroom, from all corners of the world … writers and their works to [nurture] the minds of their pupils … Th rough these teachers … these scholars learnt that oppression was created by mankind, could be ended by mankind, and that a new society could be created too by mankind.46
Many of the teachers Dudley refers to were part of an intellectual tradition coming out of the left-wing reading and discussion circles and broad social movements in South Africa at the time.
Ben Kies was the most influential of these scholars and teachers at Trafalgar High. He was regarded as the leader among the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) leadership. His tall and sturdy bearing complemented his incisive intelligence, encyclopedic knowledge and frank, forthright manner. Kies was part of the leadership that propagated the notion of a principled, programmatic struggle propounded by the All African Convention (AAC) and its constituent organisations, formed in 1936, and later by the NEUM, formed in 1943. Both these organisations propagated a struggle against racial oppression and economic domination on the basis of a minimum programme of demands, aimed at breaking with the dependence on ruling-class concessions that was the premise of the nationalist politics of negotiation adopted by the ANC at the time. These more radical intellectuals saw the limitations of narrow nationalism and were inspired by the ideals of the French and Russian revolutions, by the works of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and by the ideas stemming from the internationalist, anti-colonial movement emerging from the period after the Bolshevik revolution. The NEUM, a broad front of civic and political organisations, reached the peak of its popularity in the late forties and early fifties but then fragmented and was eclipsed by the more popular ANC and later Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The ideology of the NEUM, however, remained influential in the 1950s and beyond and was marked by subscription to a radical anti-imperialist internationalism and to a policy of ‘non-racialism’. Non-racialism challenged the existence of the category of ‘race’ and insisted on a common humanity of all people and on a definition of national identity that stressed common interests rather than differences among South Africans. This particular conceptualisation of non-racialism was to be at the heart of Rive’s work as a teacher, sports activist and writer. Ironically, while Rive revered him as a teacher and an intellectual, Kies was later disparaging of Rive’s character and dismissive of his creative work. In the mid-1970s, Kies told me that he felt that Rive tended to be an opportunist and a poseur and that his work was trite and reinforced stereotypes.
The far-reaching ideas seeded during his high school years were further developed when Rive went to study at Hewat Teacher Training College on the Cape Flats after high school and then again during his years as a teacher at South Peninsula High School in the southern suburbs of Cape Town, where a number of his colleagues were NEUM intellectuals. Later in his career, as lecturer and eventually senior lecturer and head of the English department at Hewat College, he was also among colleagues who were leading and active members of the Teachers’ League of South Africa. At South Peninsula, Rive made his mark as an English and Latin teacher. Th rough his friendship with fellow Latin and Mathematics teacher Daphne Wessels, Rive became a very close friend to Daphne’s husband, Victor Wessels. It was largely through Wessels, but later also under the influence of prominent NEUM members such as Ivan Abrahams, a colleague at Hewat College during the 1970s and 1980s, and Harry Hendricks, with whom Rive worked in the Western Province Senior School Sports Union and in the South African Council on Sport, that Rive consolidated and refined the intellectual leitmotifs of his life – commitment to the underdog, non-racialism, progressive nationalism, principled struggle, universal equality. While ‘Rive never publicly belonged to any national liberation organisation in South Africa’,47 he was a product of, and consciously aligned himself to, the ideological positions of his political teachers and mentors in the NEUM. For most of his adult life, Rive was at one time or another a founding or leading member of civic organisations such as school-level and national sports bodies.
In a letter of 30 July 1954, Rive, a highly articulate and well-read twenty-four-year-old teacher at South Peninsula High, committed to the struggle and to the ambition of becoming a writer, describes to Langston Hughes, in the understandably overblown terms of a wide-eyed and overawed young writer in the making, himself and his political ideas:
… [I] am avidly fond of reading and fanatical about politics.
I belong to a school of thought, Trotskyite and Leftist in its outlook (shades of Senator McCarthy) who believe in non-collaboration as a political weapon. After becoming a gold-chorded [sic] King Scout in the Boy Scout Movement I was almost forced out because of speeches and reports attacking Imperialistic indoctrination and the division of the movement on racial lines. I’m out of it now.48
While at school, Rive joined the Scouts movement rather than the church brigade, as the family thought the former more respectable than membership of the church lads’ brigade, which entailed ‘marching through the streets behind a blaring, tinny band’.49 It was while he was in the Second Cape Town Boys’ Scout Troop that Rive first met artist Peter Clarke, who was to become a good friend and fellow writer. Rive’s already developed sense of the iniquities of racialism and his courage to speak out against