RICHARD RIVE was born in 1930 in Cape Town's colored slum area of District Six, later bulldozed to make way for white workers. His distinction as a student and as a national hurdles champion took him out of the ghetto to be trained as a high school teacher, then to Columbia University in the USA and to Oxford University for his Ph.D. degree in English literature, before returning again to South Africa to teach at his alma mater, the Cape teacher training institution Hewat College of Education. He participated in the campaign of defiance against apartheid that was crushed following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Rive's first novel, Emergency, dealing with his experiences in this period and banned in South Africa, was published abroad in 1964 to wide critical acclaim. Emergency Continued follows the semi-autobiographical character Andrew Dreyer some twenty-five years later, as the violence and protests that accompanied the death of apartheid were reaching their peak. His earlier works like Emergency were unbanned only in 1988. In 1989, two weeks after completing Emergency Continued and with a new play of "Buckingham Palace," District Six in rehearsal, he was stabbed to death in a robbery-murder which the trial of the killers revealed had homophobic motives. His Guardian obituary noted: "The final irony was that he died at the hands of young men of the sort that he himself might easily have become had he not as a child in District Six fallen under the spell of the written word."
