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