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