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RICHARD RIVE - INTELLECTUAL SKETCH |
| [This essay was written within a matter of days of the death
of Richard Rive in June 1989 as an obituary, but was only published in the
January 1991 issue of Isivivane: Journal of Letters and Arts in Africa and
the Diaspora (a literary review published in then West Berlin by a group
of South African exiles)].
Richard Rive: In Memoriam. The assassination of Richard Rive, on June 3rd, 1989, in Cape Town, constitutes an inestimable loss for South African literature, or for that matter, for African literature. His crucial importance within our literary history can be traced through a cultural situating of his remarkable short story, “The Bench”. This short story, which occupies a commanding position in his first collection of stories, African Songs, published in East Berlin in 1963, reappears again in a pivotal position in his last collection of selected stories, Advance, Retreat, published in Cape Town in 1983. Its importance in the genealogical structure of Rive’s literary imagination is beyond exaggeration. Internationally, the short story connected Rive to Langston Hughes, and on the continent, it opened pathways for him to Black Orpheus in Nigeria and to Transition in Uganda (outstanding literary and cultural reviews of the 1950s and 1960s, publishing work also from Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka and many others). Nationally, it situated him within the Drum literary generation, including among others, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, William ‘Bloke’ Modisane and Can Themba. Within the Cape literary culture of the 1950s, Richard belonged to a constellation of writers, whic included among others, James Matthews and Alex La Guna and Bessie Head. It was Langston Hughes based in New York City who selected “The Bench” [1999: H. I. E. Dhlomo was part of the selection jury] as the best short story in a literary competition sponsored by Drum magazine in the late 1950s. Perhaps what impressed Hughes in this short story was the unique representation of apartheid, in its full ugliness and horribleness, achieved by Richard Rive. There can be little doubt that “The Bench” is one of the ipressive achievements of our literary culture. Here we encounter an exemplary intertwining of political perception and literary figuration. The encounter between Hughes and Rive was to lead to a close literary friendship which ended with the passing away of Langston Hughes in 1967. In his autobiography, Black Writing, Richard Rive evinces the influence of Hughes. The profound nature of this influence can be seen in the fact that, not only is African Songs dedicated to Hughes, but also in the fact that the book opens with a poem by Langston Hughes, the famous “The Weary Blues”. It is clear that as much as Hughes proximated his literary figurations to African American blues, likewise, Rive parallels his literary creations (short stories) to African traditional songs. In United States, in the last few years, as a consequence of Hughes’ literary endeavors, there has emerged an African American Blues Criticism, best exemplified in the literary criticism of Houston A. Baker and Henry Louis Gates, both of whom are premier literary critics. The fruition of this Blues Criticism is especially evident in Baker’s book of 1988, Afro-American Poetics. Though in the past both Baker and Gates tended to undervalue the importance of Hughes, a recent essay by Henry Louis Gates, “The Hunmgry Icon: Langston Hughes Rides a Blue Note”, indicates a reversal of this earlier judgement. (1) Through Langston Hughes, Richard Rive was able to establish a literary relationship with Ezekiel Mphahlele and the other members of the Sophiatown Renaissance. Hughes has been very important also to Mphahlele. Probably Mphahlele’s essay on Langston Hughes, which appeared in Black Orpheus in 1961, was the first literary appreciation of this great American poet by an African scholar or literary critic. Finding a common and mutual literary master in Hughes, Rive and Mphahlele, as Rive indicates in Writing Black, maintained contact through letters, especially during Mphahlele’s twenty-year self-imposed exile. Hopefully, the future publication of these letters will guve us a unique view of our cultural history between 1957 and 1977. In writing an Introduction to the 1970 second edition of Richard Rive’s only novel, Emergency (original publication in 1964), Mphahlele was affirming the uniqueness of their literary projects. Emergency attempted to capture the historical circumstances surrounding the Sharpeville Massacre of March 1960. Appropriately, it is a fictionalization of that historical moment, rather than its mere sociological documentation. Imagination tather sociological instrumentalization, was at the center of Rive’s literary enterprise. In an Introduction to Modern African Prose (first edition in 1964), edited by himself, which in passing pays homage to Mphahlele’s The African Image, Richard Rive presents his literary credo in the following manner: “By African literature, for the purpose of this anthology, I mean literature produced by Africans (regardless of colour, language or national distinction), which deals with situations and experiences happening on the continent. I have therefore included the work of two white writers from South Africa as I feel that they must not be denied a place in the body of African literature. It is impossible to speak of African literature without recognizing Afrikaans writing in South Africa, Portuguese poetry in Mozambique or Arabic verse in the Sudan. Literature, when valid, brlongs to all of human experience and cannot be confined within the rigid and narrow framework of political and national prejudice. I, too, have seen too much that is good in literature produce by Afrikaaners in South Africa for us to deny its existence and importance simply because the language used is that of an unpopular regime.” In this, Richard Rive was following on an intellectual and cultural credo established by Mphahlele in The African Image: “I have seen too much that is good in West culture---for example its music,literature and theater---to want to repudiate it.” In many ways also, Rive was following on the cultural-philosophical credo promulgated at the famous or infamous Conference of African Writers of English Expression in Kampala, in 1962, in which literature written by Africans in the European languages was theorized as the pre-eminent form of African Literature. Obi Wali’s objection to this, in an essay which appeared in Transition in 1963, is well-known. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s recent riposte against this Conference in Decolonizing the Mind, definitively explicates the nature of the hold of Western cultural imperialism (through European languages) of African literary expressions, of wich the Kampala Conference of 1962 was oblivious. In assembling the numerous short stories by Alf Wannenburgh, James Watthews, Elex La Guma and himself in Quartett: New Voices From South Africa the literary credo established in Modern African Prose. The Quartett is dedicated to Zeke Mphahlele “in admiration and regard for his work for literature on the African continent in general, and for this country, South Africa in particular.” But beyond this sphere of mutual influences, the nature of the selection on short stories in Quartett, shows us Richard Rive’s profound historical understanding and cultural appreciation of District Six. Its destruction by the South African fascist regime, without the consent of the people affected to make way for a white suburb, was a culturtal catastrophe of major consequence, which in many ways parallels the destruction of the Sophiatown Renaissance by the same despicable regime. As a response to the cultural and political madness of the Afrikaner government, Rive composed a book of brilliant cultural eloquence, ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six (1986). A medley of evocative literary movements, moving from the Morning of 1955 through the afternoon of 1960 to the evening of 1970, the book evokes the tragic greatness of an incomprarable people, the so-called Coloureds of our unhappy country. The book is a monument to solitude and meditation. It would be very much remiss in concluding this homage without indicating Richard Rive’s deep attachement to our literary history. In fact, his exemplary literary work is a deep blue African song celebrating the cultural interconnections of international African culture in our time. For this celebration to be really sound within our South African context, Rive traced his literary lineages from Olive Schreiner and Solomon T. Plaatje. His editing of the letters of Olive Schreiner shows his identification with this great writer. His affinity with the author of Mhudi (most likely the first African historical novel in English language by an African), can be glimpsed in his Solomon T. Plaatje Memorial Lecture given at the University of Bophuthatswana on September 11, 1982. He says in the Lecture the following among many other illuminating things: “A people desperately needs to see not only the road ahead but the road along which it came. Its vision is not only of the future but also of the past. And in its rediscovery of that past, names like B. W. Vilakazi, H. I. E. and R. R. R. Dhlomo and S. E. K. Mqhayi must assume a new significance. And if any one figure will become larger than the rest, it could be that extraordinary person of many talents, who was able to create out of the debris of wilful and deliberate denigration and emasculation, works of erudition and beauty.” Richard Rive’s retrieval of our literary history did not stop here. On the occasion of the high moment of the Staffrider literary generation (1977-87), he remapped for us (we who follow on his literary generation) the complex contours and constellations of black South African literary history from the Second World War to the present. It was a dazzling display of analytical powers. Without doubt, Richard Rive will occupy a prominent position in a new literary history of our country, that will have to be written in a post-apartheid South Africa. Los Angeles, California. NOTES. |
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