Concerning the Boy Scouts, in South Africa it is divided into racialistic groups. When Lord Rowallen, chief scout of the world, visited South Africa, a preliminary meeting of Scouts was called to ‘decide on the questions he was to be asked’. People started asking silly questions like official length of garter-tabs and colours of scarves. Everyone shirked the political issue till I asked ‘whether the division of Scouts into racialistic groups as practised in South Africa was in accordance with true Scouting principle and tradition’! Complete chaos. When we met Rowallen I asked the same questions and of course things were made so hot for me that I resigned. My troop threatened to resign in protest. But I objected.50
We glimpse in this letter, in both the actual event recalled as well as in the rhetorical representation of himself in the narrative, with its evident sense of rhythm, drama and climax, the fearless, outspoken leader of the troop, the irrepressible and just voice of a leader of the silent, oppressed masses. The young Rive is keenly, even boastingly aware of the transgressive nature of his ideas, of his talent for words and courage to speak out, and of his ability to play leader.
His fearless breaking of the silence on racial issues must have been spurred on by his own experiences of racist attitudes because of his dark skin. While the progressive teachers at Trafalgar High were to help him formulate his non-racialism, there were others whose bigotry must have wounded him deeply. Gilbert Reines, who was a fellow pupil at Trafalgar and later the husband of Rive’s primary school teacher Ursula Reines, remembers one such Standard 6 teacher they had at the school:
You know, in those days, you had to bring your mug to school to receive milk, and if you’ve forgotten it, [this teacher] used to put a saucer on the floor with milk in it, and make you lick it, you know, lap it up like, like a cat … And … he always tried to catch Richard out, I think, for something or other. But one day … he said to Richard very seriously, ‘Oh d’jys ʼn slim kaffir’ [‘Oh, you’re a clever kaffir’].51
In the classroom, on the sports field, inside the home – wherever he turned, it must have seemed to the young Richard Rive, he was being assaulted by soul-destroying hatred based on the colour of his skin.
Besides highlighting the racial situation of the time of his childhood, the early chapters in Writing Black focus on two other areas of his youth so fundamental to Rive’s whole life – sport and his ambition to be a writer. Even at an early age, Rive was a superb athlete (as he revelled in recounting when he was an older, rotund and quite out-of-shape man), winning prizes at amateur competitions organised by the well-meaning social workers in District Six. Peter Meyer, a long-standing colleague in the sporting world and fellow educationist, traces Rive’s development as a sportsman:
His interest in athletics started at primary school and developed under the guidance of physical education teacher ‘Lightning’ Smith at Trafalgar High School … He excelled particularly in the four-hundred-yards hurdles … and the high jump. During the late 1940s he became the South African champion in these events, participating in the colours of the Western Province Amateur Athletics Union and in competitions of the South African Amateur Athletics and Cycling Board of Control.52
According to Joe Schaffers, Smith was a well-known wrestler and a member of the ‘exclusive, upper-class “Coloured”’ Aerial Athletics Club, which Rive also joined. Even his earliest aspirations of developing his talent as a sportsman were frustrated by the politics of racism and prejudice: ‘At first the members, all fair-skinned, were worried about my dark complexion, but relented because not only was I a mere junior but I attended Trafalgar High School.’53 This attitude, which tempers overt racism with overlays of class considerations, encountered by Rive early on in life, surely increased his determination to get the best education he could and, in addition, to flaunt it as a retort to people judging him by the colour of his skin.
Besides his participation in organised sport, Rive was also keen on mountain hiking, often walking up the numerous tracks on Table Mountain with friends and students. The walks through the mountains above Kalk Bay and the paths up Table Mountain from the Pipe Track were favourite routes. He loved swimming and the sea, and occasionally went spear-fishing. One of his spear-fishing friends was Jim Bailey, owner of Drum magazine. Rive knew Bailey even before he made a long trip in 1955 to Johannesburg to meet the staff of Drum and Es’kia Mphahlele in particular.
Every other aspect of life selected for display by Rive in Writing Black – childhood, sport, teaching, studying, travelling – is consciously and demonstratively linked to the colour question and oppression in South Africa. The autobiography is as much protest literature, or ‘anti-Jim Crow’ as he calls it, as it is memoir. In fact Writing Black grew out of a keynote paper Rive delivered at the conference of the African Literature Association of America held at the University of Indiana in Bloomington in 1979. His paper was called ‘The Ethics of an Anti-Jim Crow’ and used the story of his childhood in District Six and young adult life to emphasise the complete exclusion of people who were not white from civil society in South Africa.
In both the paper and the memoir, Rive links his drive to be a writer to his being a keen reader as a child, a connection commonly made by many other writers when recounting memories of childhood, as documented in Antonia Fraser’s edited volume The Pleasure of Reading. Rive read voraciously and indiscriminately everything he could get his hands on ‘to escape from the realities of the deprivation surrounding me’.54 He also insists on capturing the racialised assumptions about the world of books embedded in the perceptions of his young self: ‘I never questioned the fact that all the good characters, the hero figures, were White and that all the situations were White … Books were not written about people like me. Books were not written by people like me.’
The initial chapter, which covers the period between 1937 and 1955, is in fact primarily about Rive becoming a writer. It is noteworthy that a number of aspects of his childhood reading are foregrounded and conflated in his recreation of these early years. He establishes that he was a keen reader as a high school student and states that he was drawn to the classics of English literature. He names Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott and Haggard in particular. Rive was not only genuinely inspired by these writers, but was also consciously establishing and asserting his credentials as a cosmopolitan intellectual and writer. In addition, he has an acute awareness of how the received literary tradition was constructed and functioned as a Eurocentric way of seeing the world. The United States was not only the place of origin of Rive’s enigmatic father but also, ironically, the source of the inspiration to be an ‘African’ writer; to feel that his life, his place and his times were worthy subjects for serious literature.
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.