Growing up in such conditions, confining and dilapidated yet with a sense of respectability and even grandeur, with Nancy’s ambiguous love and care, and an intimacy with only some of his siblings, Rive undoubtedly, like many other youngsters with talent entrapped by circumstance, often retreated into the world of the mind – to books. He also found refuge in the friendship of neighbourhood boys who accepted, admired and were intrigued by his way with words and his wit.
Rive’s brother-in-law Freddie Josias, husband to Georgina, the sibling to whom Rive felt the closest (possibly because they were the two youngest), describes Rive’s family as existing in circumstances that forced them ‘to live from hand to mouth’.13 A schoolmate of Rive’s, Gilbert Reines, says Rive did not have shoes at one time (like many of the children in the Coulson photograph) and that he came from ‘a really poor family’.14 Rive himself talks of their living ‘in an atmosphere of shabby respectability’, playing down somewhat the level of poverty but putting his finger on the quest for middle-class respectability and a ‘decent’ life.15 As a single mother, Nancy struggled to make ends meet, but the cost of keeping the household going by the time Richard was growing up and going to school was supplemented from the wages of older siblings like Georgina, who worked at a city printing firm, Herzberg and Mulne, and the second-eldest brother, Davey, who worked at Flack’s furniture store in the city.
As a respectable churchgoing Anglican, Nancy Rive had her baby boy baptised and later, in his early teens, confirmed at St Mark’s Church on Clifton Hill in the District, just a short walk from their Caledon Street home. One of the few fleeting references to his mother comes in Rive’s memoir and is prompted by his visit, in 1963 while on an extended tour of Africa and Europe, to the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Th ere, he recalls accompanying his mother to present the family Bible to the church and remembers St Mark’s in terms that suggest the church was a refuge from the hostilities of the outside world for the young boy: ‘And the cosily lit warm interior on a Sunday evening when the south-easter howled outside … I was a boy in St Mark’s on the Hill, comfortably dozing through the warm monotony of Evensong.’16
While St Mark’s Church was to feature prominently as a site of communal ritual and resistance in Rive’s work, as it did in the history of resistance to forced removals in the District, he turned his back on religion in his adult life, becoming an atheist – as were many of his left-wing mentors and friends who defended their atheism by, for example, quoting Karl Marx’s dictum about religion being the opium of the people and circulating Bertrand Russell’s polemical essay ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’, which attacked Christian hypocrisy and mystification. The fact that the policies of segregation pre-1948 and those of apartheid after that were rationalised using Christian doctrine increased the alienation of many intellectuals of the time from Christianity (in particular) and religion in general. Many others, though, were drawn to religion and the church as part of their lives; some of Rive’s close friends in his youth – Albert Adams and John Ramsdale – were active churchgoers. One of Rive’s early short stories, ‘No Room at Solitaire’ (1963), exposes the hypocrisy of the Afrikaner characters who profess to be Christian but rudely turn away a sick and pregnant black woman and her husband from their inn. Although a jarringly obvious allegory on the plight of Mary and Joseph on Christmas Eve, the story ends with the racist Afrikaner men having an epiphany of the import of their inhumane act – an ending that reflects Rive’s persistent belief in the possibility for good in everyone, a quality present in all his creative work. Unlike his contemporaries Alex La Guma and Dennis Brutus, Rive was impelled not by a strong sense of anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist ideology, but rather by more liberal convictions about individual and human rights. In this sense, Rive shared more common ground as a writer with his friends and fellow writers Es’kia Mphahlele and James Matthews.
Surrounded by ‘dirty, narrow streets in a beaten-up neighbourhood’, his family, Rive claims, was marked by an obsessive hankering after respectability: ‘We always felt we were intended for better things.’17 The gently parodic tone in which this is said in his memoir, written forty years after this period of childhood, indicates a measure of distancing from these familial aspirations. As a young man in his twenties, though, Rive still identified with them, needing to be ‘respectable’ and ‘civilised’, able to transcend the ‘decrepit’ place he inhabited. He would, in his second letter to Langston Hughes in 1954, excitedly and assertively introduce himself: ‘Age 23 years. I was born in District Six (one of the most terrible slums in Cape Town, although I come from a cultured family).’18 The early letters to Hughes are clearly trying to impress the older, internationally acclaimed figure with the young writer’s knowledge of place and his sense of being ‘cultured’. In this description of himself and his origins, Rive interestingly distances himself from District Six, calling his birthplace a ‘terrible slum’, unlike the affirmative and often nostalgic portrayal in the later novel ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six. In this description to Hughes of the District and of himself, it is interesting that the qualifier ‘although’ is used to separate the District from the notion of being ‘cultured’. ‘Culture’ was elsewhere and, like his sister Lucy and his brother Joseph, Rive ‘fled the District as soon as possible’.19 Thirty years later, however, when the resistance to forced removals had reached a pitch in the struggles of the oppressed, District Six, like numerous other residential areas (for example, Sophiatown in Johannesburg and South End in Port Elizabeth), became, for him, the country and the world, an iconic space of unjust displacement and of justified reclamation; a place of reinvented and celebrated pasts textured as both real and imagined.
The young Richard sensed himself on the margins of the family – not only was he much younger than his siblings, but he was much darker in complexion and had a different father. This sense of estrangement from family is only fleetingly dealt with in his autobiography where he says that ‘in [his] loneliness’, he cultivated friendships with down-and-out, working-class boys whom his family derogatorily called his ‘skollie friends’ (gangster friends).20 Writing Black is particularly silent on family; Rive’s main focus is to fashion his young self as a reader, budding writer and metonymic voice against racism, an individual who simultaneously represents and transcends the oppressed condition. Above all, Rive’s memoir is protest, an indictment of racial tyranny and its attempts to categorise, to confine and silence him, and to erase the spaces that define him. But of his inner life as a child in a family, the work is remarkably silent. There is no mention, for example, of the death of his mother or what it meant to him. There is more descriptive detail in the portrayal of the character of Mary, ‘proprietor’ of the local brothel that the four-year-old Rive stumbles upon in his neighbourhood. As is the case in the later fictional work, the memoir is marked by the invocation of alternative forms of family and intimacy constituted by fellow writers, work colleagues, sportsmen, a few friends and the young men he befriends. The twenty-four photographs that open Writing Black carry not a single image of the family – there is one of the District and the rest are images of Rive himself in the company of or, through the mechanism of photographic collage, associated with prominent South African and African writers.
Writing Black recounts Rive’s childhood primarily through eyes that see the racial conflicts and dilemmas in South Africa as pervasive. His father’s side provided ‘the Black strain’, the ‘strain’ Rive insisted in his adult life on proclaiming and defending in contrast to the marked silence about it within his family.21 Nancy Rive, who was born into the Ward family from Klapmuts, a small settlement in the Boland area on the outskirts of Cape Town, proudly displayed her father in a mounted photograph (showing him in a cheese-cutter hat with a droopy moustache next to his champion racehorse) which had a special place on the dining-room wall. He is described by Rive as ‘unmistakably white’. Stephen Gray, a fellow writer and long-standing friend of Rive’s, describes Rive’s hair as ‘Saint Helenan kinky’, suggesting that some of Rive’s forebears were from the South Atlantic island.22 One wonders if Gray heard this bit of family genealogy from Rive himself. Nancy’s father was, it seems, a descendant of the Ward family on the island of St Helena. The St Helenan diaspora in the Cape and in other coastal areas of South Africa – Port Elizabeth, Durban, Port Nolloth – often asserted their connection to Britain and were generally