Emergency Continued

Description:

A great novel by a great South African black writer. A father's search for his runaway son carries the older man on a journey through the confusion and violence that marked the closing years of apartheid.

Brief description: 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."

Review Quotes:

"The events Andrew is involved in during his search for his son illuminate what turned out to be the final onslaught that caused white power - in its own self-interest - to abandon the trappings of apartheid.... Richard Rive gives us an unusual glimpse of the dissension behind the barricades of the anti-apartheid movement. Andrew's detestation of the coerciveness of the activists makes him a traitor in the view of some of his colleagues and students.... The resolution [at the end] seems an act of faith denying despair. This is apt, perhaps, given the uncertainty that lies ahead in the rebuilding of a South Africa freed from apartheid that Rive tragically did not live to witness."

"The fictitious author shuttles uneasily between the violence of the streets, where stones and petrol bombs are pitted against guns and Casspirs, and the privileged seclusion of his study.... But he also begins to sense the sterility of his withdrawal, the irrelevance of his liberal stance of principled individualism while the regime inexorably picks off its opponents by arrests and assassinations. It is this realization, in which one senses Rive's personal dilemmas, more than the chronicled events, that gives this novel its tragic resonance, which is increased by the fact that it was the author's last."

"A 'docu-novel' about the schoolchildren's uprisings in Cape Town in 1985, this sets the private experience of a 'colored'(mixed-race) teacher [Andrew] against the violent confrontations in the classrooms and on the streets.... In his search for his fugitive son, Andrew is a committed and intelligent witness, who confronts the elemental struggle against apartheid and also the deep conflicts between the generations."

"For its exciting plot, urbanity, and challenging issues this novel belongs in every academic library."

"Rive movingly describes the terrible toll apartheid has taken on individuals, families, and whole communities. A memorable portrait of a particular time, place and condition."

Nadine Gordimer on Richard Rive: "A thousand miles apart, in Cape Town and Johannesburg, we had the bond writers have where they share not only opposition to censorship but also the fact of belonging to a counterculture (in our case non-racist) ...in a society to which writers are opposed and which ignores or reviles them."