A one-man play on Rive’s life and work, A Writer’s Last Word, written by Sylvia Vollenhoven and Basil Appollis, premiered at the Grahamstown Festival in 1998 and was restaged at the One City, Many Cultures festival in Cape Town in 1999. Appollis also directed a stage adaptation of ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six (for which he and I wrote the script) for the Drama department at the University of Cape Town in March 2000, and for Artscape Theatre in Cape Town in 2001. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has considered serialising the novel for television and Appollis is working on a film version of the book. Rive insists on continually resurfacing in the decades after his death.
In the period approaching the twentieth anniversary of the 1994 elections, sometimes referred to as the period of post-transition, the field of literary studies is intensely preoccupied with the literature of the present, of the ‘now’, and with attempts to characterise post-1994 South African literature and culture, particularly with regard to the new forms and subjects of writing that have emerged. This, in part, has resulted in diminished interest in pre-1994 literature, especially in the work of black South African writers. Less attention seems to have been paid to the way the post-1994 period has freed up the act of reading. Just as writing has been freed of the obligatory social and political protest, reading has also been unhinged from old black and white thematics and allowed to proliferate in hugely variegated, exploratory and eccentric ways. New kinds of reading frames will allow us to revisit our literary legacy and find in it new meanings, new pertinence. Certain interpretations of Rive’s work in this biography would never have been possible under apartheid. Comrades (and I) would have seen my queer reading of ‘The Visits’ as defaming Rive, and would have dismissed it as self-indulgent and individualistic, detracting from the priorities of the struggle.
In compiling this biography, particular strands of Rive’s life, thought, work and times are continuous refracting lenses in the narrative, skewing the biography into idiosyncratic angles – looking at those parts that interest me. The first of these is a preoccupation with the idea of non-racialism to which Rive not only subscribed, but which I suggest is at (as Yeats puts it in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’) ‘the deep heart’s core’ of his being, of his private, civic and writing life. This belief in non-racialism coexisted, often in tense fashion, with his angry humanism and, paradoxically, with his own peculiarly racialised self-fashioning. Large swathes of the past from which Rive comes, and which he also helped to form, are fast disappearing.4 Invaluable and luminous moments of personal memory are thus rapidly fading as his family, associates, colleagues and comrades die or forget. The past of Rive’s era is currently being fiercely contested on a multitude of levels.5
Rive, in his educational, civic and literary work, entered the conflicts of apartheid South Africa from a consistently nonracial position, to defend people of colour from imposed ignominy and deprivation. This way of envisioning human relations is undervalued and even devalued in post-1994 South Africa because neo-liberal economic and attendant social policies of the South African government, its global partners and corporations, despite the rhetoric of non-racialism, have reinforced old intersecting racial and class barriers which suit their profit-driven agendas.6 While the term ‘non-racial’ has been widely adopted currently as nomenclature for the state’s position and as a description of the African National Congress (ANC) policy in the days of struggle, what the ANC, now the ruling national party in South Africa, draws on and practises post-1994 should in effect be called ‘multiracialism’. Even the liberal 1996 Constitution of South Africa, which insists on the equality of all races, nevertheless continues to use the term ‘race’ in an unqualified way. Neville Alexander puts this contradiction we live with cogently: ‘The fact that the relationship be tween an unavoidable national South African identity and the possible sub-national identities continues to constitute the stuff of political contestation in post-apartheid South Africa today demonstrates clearly how tenacious the hold of history is on the consciousness of the masses of people.’7
The assumed existence of different ‘races’ or ‘sub-national identities’ makes reconciliation between groups the most urgent task in contemporary South Africa, rather than, as is implicit in Rive’s brand of ‘non-racialism’, the abolition of the very notion of race. The current terms of the national census and mechanisms of employment equity and redress, particularly the national policy of affirmative action, serve to entrench notions of ‘race’ and of racialised perceptions and consciousness. These operate on the basis of racial profiling, which serves to advance a minority of black middle-class citizens rather than address much more fundamental questions of poverty, land and employment. This fairly hegemonic ‘racialised’, ‘multicultural’ mindset – ‘we are different but equal’ – common in contemporary South Africa and prevalent elsewhere globally, is identified by Cornel West as perpetuating fraught social relations in the United States in recent years. He instead suggests that, unlike the ‘othering’ positions of the American conservatives and liberals, we need ‘to establish a new framework … to begin with a frank acknowledgement of the basic humanness … of each of us’.8 Rive’s notion of non-racialism would completely concur with West’s emphasis on a human and national commonality, rather than primarily on racial distinction and ethnic difference.9
Does Richard Rive have anything to say to us in the twenty-first century in a markedly changed South Africa, so implicated in a firmly neo-liberal and rapidly fomenting global order and with a persistent, viral residue of the old colonial apartheid past? The prominence of the ‘race question’ in contemporary South Africa has resulted in renewed debate on questions of race, division, perception and racism in our society. This is not peculiar to South Africa, of course: one finds parallel concerns in other parts of the world, especially in North America, Britain and Europe. A re-examination of Rive’s life and work entails a reflection on his fight against racialism and for a well-defined non-racialism. This book, and the continued interest in Rive’s work and life, will, it is hoped, contribute to current debates about what kinds of knowledge we need to generate about ourselves and others to establish a truly ‘new’ non-exploitative South Africa.
Renewed interest in notions of ‘coloured identity’, part of an increasing trend in South Africa, which interrogates and/or affirms particular constructions of personal, ethnic and national identity, or what Desiree Lewis eloquently calls ‘“new” fictions of freedom and selfhood’, has ironically resulted in a resurgence of interest in Rive’s life and work.10 Rive himself resisted the notion that he was coloured and his non-racialism saw this classification as a creation by colonialism and apartheid, as part of the divide-and-rule politics of European domination. In so far as this position was a direct ideological retort by a segment of the oppressed intelligentsia, Crain Soudien’s classification of it as ‘counter official’ is useful, since this stresses the oppositional genesis of this stance to the notion of being coloured.11 If he were still alive, Rive would probably not only have baulked at being seen as a ‘coloured’ writer but would in all likelihood have decried attempts to give credence and respectability to this kind of racialised identity.
The subtitle refers to my wanting to go beyond Rive’s declarations about his life and struggle. I am interested in the silences in his life and work, and what I find to be encodings of homoerotic desire and alterity, and deeply personal anxiety about the self in his world, in his fiction and some of the other work. Alongside the anger against injustice that sometimes made his authorial voice gratingly obvious, Rive is remarkably silent, in both life and fiction,