Richard Rive
Richard Rive was a prominent South African short-story writer and novelist, born in the early 1930s in the multiracial district of District Six, Cape Town. He embarked on an academic journey that included a teaching diploma, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cape Town, and advanced degrees from Columbia University and the University of Oxford. Rive began his writing career with the 1963 collection *Quartet: New Voices from South Africa* and published his first volume of short stories, *African Songs*, that same year, largely due to the limited opportunities for black authors in South Africa. His works often addressed the harsh realities of apartheid, with his novel *Emergency* depicting the 1960 Sharpeville massacre through the eyes of a conflicted teacher. Rive's writing was characterized by a commitment to authentic representation, capturing the diverse experiences of Africans rather than conforming to a singular narrative. He remained in South Africa during a time of great upheaval, aiming to resist apartheid's divisive nature through his craft. Tragically, Rive was murdered shortly after the release of his novel *Emergency Continued* in 1990. He is remembered for his contributions to literature and education, as well as for his efforts to articulate the struggles and complexities of life under apartheid.
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Subject Terms
Richard Rive
South African novelist, short fiction writer, playwright, and editor
- Born: March 1, 1931
- Birthplace: District Six, Cape Town, South Africa
- Died: June 4, 1989
- Place of death: Elfindale, South Africa
Biography
Richard Rive, a short-story writer and novelist, was born in the early 1930s to a working-class family in a multiracial part of Cape Town, South Africa, known as District Six. He attended Hewat Training College in Cape Town, earning his teaching diploma in 1951. Rive later earned a bachelor of education degree from the University of Cape Town, followed by a master’s degree from Columbia University and a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he had a research fellowship. Rive taught English and Latin at South Peninsula High School in Cape Town before pursuing a career in writing.
Rive’s first foray into writing was published in the collection Quartet: New Voices from South Africa in 1963, for which Rive served as the editor. That same year Rive published a volume of his short stories, African Songs, in East Berlin, since few publishers in South Africa were interested in black authors. Rive’s short stories, translated into more than one dozen languages, describe the oppressions and degradations of life under apartheid. His first full-length work, the novel Emergency, was published in 1964. Emergency is a fictionalized tale of the massacre of black protesters by South African police that occurred in 1960 in Sharpeville. The main character is a teacher who has moral and political problems that accentuate the issues of this time period. The biography resembles Rive’s own history.
In 1982, Rive released Writing Black, which was a collection of personal stories and essays that shows the dissatisfaction that his family felt due to the life they were forced to live in the slum of District Six. The following year, Rive published Advance, Retreat: Selected Short Stories. His second novel, Buckingham Palace, District Six, appeared in 1987. Rive adapted the novel into a play that was produced in Cape Town two years later. A sequel to Rive’s first novel, Emergency Continued, was published in 1990. Two weeks after the publication of Emergency Continued, Rive was found murdered near his home. He was a lecturer at Hewat Training College at the time.
A respected writer during his lifetime, Rive believed that to maintain his objectivity as a writer, he could not align himself with any political or literary group. When many writers were leaving South Africa, Rive chose to stay and resist apartheid’s racial divisiveness. His goal as a writer was to project truth in his writing, which meant showing the diversity of the experiences of Africans rather than attempting to create a unified African experience. He was the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including being selected as a Fulbright scholar, a Heft scholar, and Writer of the Year for South Africa. Rive is remembered as both a writer and an academic.
Author Works
Drama
Buckingham Palace, District Six, pr. 1989
Edited Text(s)
Quartet: New Voices from South Africa, 1963
Modern African Prose, 1964
Long Fiction
Emergency, 1964
Buckingham Palace, District Six, 1987
Emergency Continued, 1990
Nonfiction
Writing Black, 1982
Seme: The Founder of the ANC, 1992 (with Tim Couzens)
Short Fiction
African Songs, 1963
Advance, Retreat: Selected Short Stories, 1983
Bibliography
Graham, Shane. “‘This Curious Thing’: Richard Rive, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Commodification of the Black Atlantic.” Safundi, vol. 18, no. 3, 2017, pp. 205–20. EBSCO Political Science Complete, doi:10.1080/17533171.2017.1324059. Accessed 30 June 2017. Analyzes Rive's short story "Midlde Passage" and his correspondence with American poet Langston Hughes and Rive's thoughts on African diaspora literature.
Viljoen, Shaun. Richard Rive: A Partial Biography. Wits UP, 2001. Presents a comprehensive biography of Rive from shortly before his birth until his death in 1989. Written by a former colleague and friend.
Viljoen, Shaun. “Proclamations and Silences: ‘Race’, Self-Fashioning and Sexuality in the Trans-Atlantic Correspondence between Langston Hughes and Richard Rive.” Social Dynamics, vol. 33, no. 2, 2007, pp. 105–22. Analyzes Rive's personal correspondence and creative, critical, and autobiographical writings.
Viljoen, Shaun C. “Richard Rive: Non-Racialism in a Life of Writing and of Sport.” South African Journal for Research in Sport, Physical Education & Recreation, vol. 33, no. 2, 2011, pp. 127–41. EBSCO SPORTDiscus with Full Text, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=s3h&AN=67011176&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 30 June 2017. Traces the genesis and promotion of Rive's ideas of nonracialism, locating them in both his personal experiences of childhood and youth and in the sociopolitical and educational contexts of his time.