I came to know Rive in the mid-1970s through his association with Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) intellectual Victor Wessels at discussions and parties at Victor’s home in Fairways and then in Walmer Estate. I also encountered him in this period at forums like the Cape Flats Educational Fellowship, where he often gave workshops on English and African literature for high school students. I also saw and heard him in meetings on civic and sports issues during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but we were by no means friends. In fact, I thought little of his work and disliked his pompous and affected manner; he in turn thought little of me (or so it seemed), sensing perhaps my reservations about his work (I have not a single signed copy of any of his books), my natural reserve generally and my preference, unlike him, for remaining in the shadows, away from public glare.
It was only during a meeting in London in 1986, when I was a student at London University and he was passing through to secure a visiting professorship at Harvard, that we really spoke to each other over supper in North London at the home of Maeve Heneke, a mutual friend. It was then that he recruited me to take up a teaching post at Hewat College of Education, in fact to take his place while he was on leave teaching at Harvard. He was head of the English department at the college, where I worked closely with him from 1987 to his death in 1989. A friendship of sorts developed, but there always remained a measure of distance between us. Tension increased between us at certain times, such as during my participation in a Hewat College stage production by colleague Colleen Radus of his novel ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six in 1988, when he disliked the way I had rescripted parts of his own script. He nevertheless remained generous and at times very warm towards me, asking me to housesit on occasion, and on his last birthday before he died, we had supper together with two other Hewat colleagues, Marina Lotter and Martin Dyers, both of whom he liked and who in turn really liked him. At the time of his death, my admiration for him as a writer and a man had grown, but I remained sceptical of the literary value of much of his work. The more I thought and uncovered about him and the work over the next twenty years, the larger he has grown in my esteem, tempering an initial ambivalence about him as a writer and a person and learning to understand the limitations of my then narrower notions of what constitutes literature. I began to grasp his immense courage, drive and vision as a writer.
Ten years after his death, I decided to undertake this project while working at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. There was no existing biography of Rive. It was also becoming clear that that old racism was persisting in the ‘new’ South Africa at the turn of the century and taking on new, often insidious forms. A biography of Rive would allow me to share more widely our joint commitment to non-racialism as we had known it and perhaps contribute to local and national debate. It was in the course of this research for more than a decade that I started to rethink some of my harsher and decontextualised judgements about Rive’s work and character and came to realise how large he loomed, and still does, as a character with his acerbic wit and humour, how lonely and troubled he was and, above all, what a compelling teller of tales.
There are other overlaps between my own and Rive’s life. We were both classified by apartheid as coloured and styled by the times as ‘coloured intellectuals’ despite our resistance to this; we were the products of the political outlook of the NEUM and felt compelled to assert a (Western) cosmopolitanism that stemmed from resistance to the balkanising tribalism and racism being fostered by the South African ruling classes; like Rive, I have ended up being markedly ‘anglophilic’ in a certain sense (teaching in English departments, for example) and yet, at the same time, we both found ourselves countering that very impulse and propagating African literature and local writing through our work at secondary and tertiary educational institutions; like Rive, although for different reasons (and a few of the same?), I am uneasy with the label of being ‘gay’ as definitive of who one is.
Finally, a biography of Rive needs to capture something of the spirit of the man most of those interviewed remember – his wit, sometimes scathing, sometimes entertaining, sometimes self-parodying; his natural ability as a raconteur, making him a memorable teacher, colleague and friend. In the end, I hope the Rive I have refracted is what Virginia Woolf hoped for in her fictional characters: ‘I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters … I think that gives exactly what I want: humanity, humour, depth.’20 Reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde, one wonders to what extent Rive echoes dimensions of Wilde – the dandy, the raconteur, the Magdalen graduate, the aphorisms, the drive to write, the love that dare not speak its name, the changing of dates of birth to make himself a little younger, the tragic ending – were these a strange case of fate, or perhaps, in part at least, coincidences cultivated by Rive?
In 2011 I found myself in Berlin trying to delve into Rive’s connection with the old East Berlin, which was where his first book, African Songs, was published in 1963. It was then that I had, for the first and only time, a dream in which Richard appeared.
He visits me in my small townhouse in Wynberg (as he did not long before he was killed) and I am showing him a passage from my biography. He thrusts back the book and sneers, ‘That is wrong! You’ve got it completely wrong.’ I am about to say, ‘But … I got that part from … Colleen’ then choke on my words. We descend the narrow stairs with him behind me. I turn to look over my shoulder and catch Richard about to push me down the stairs. I wake up.
Part I: 1930 – 1960
Chapter 1
The great influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919, ‘the Spanish flu’ as it was called, is thought to have started in military camps in Kansas, in the United States. From there, it rapidly spread to the rest of the world killing, it is estimated, between 20 and 40 million people, more than had died in the five years of the First World War.1 The plague reached South Africa within months. In Cape Town, a vital stopover on the route of humans and goods between East and West, a young, married, working-class couple, Nancy and Joseph Rive, ‘coloured’ in the racialising language of the time,2 had started a modest home in the area of District Six, abutting the centre of the burgeoning port town at the base of the monumental Table Mountain. The area was created as Cape Town’s sixth municipal district in 1867 and by the time Nancy and Joseph moved there, it was less of the edgy area once known for its crime and prostitution and was developing into a vibrant, cosmopolitan and mainly working-class residential area.3 District Six was, however, like all land in the newly formed Union of South Africa, a contested space where white supremacy and resistance to racial oppression did battle. The ANC had been formed a few years earlier, in 1912, by African intellectuals, ‘bitter and betrayed’ by their exclusion from the common voters’ roll, while the white leadership of the new union divided the country into wealthier white and impoverished black areas with their 1913 Natives Land Act.4
It was the District, as it was commonly known to locals, that was to become home to the young Richard Rive in the 1930s and early 1940s, but from which he quickly fled as a teenager to escape the constraints of his family circumstances and to make something of himself. It was the District, however, which would prove to be a perennial preoccupation of his imagination and would be intimately associated with his best work.
In 1918 Nancy Rive gave birth to her seventh child, a little girl she called Georgina, most likely after the British monarch at the time, King George V. Like vast numbers of residents of the District, the Rives were great admirers of British royalty, whose portraits were displayed in their homes. The other six Rive children were Joseph, the eldest boy, and then came David (known also as Davey), Arthur, Harold, Douglas and another girl, Lucy. Soon after Georgina’s birth, tragedy struck the family and Joseph Rive (senior) died, a victim of the Spanish flu that, quite strangely for influenza,