![]() These efforts were described by academic Stephen Gray as, “The Hughes-led project simply to put African literature in general, as he saw it, on the postwar English-language map worldwide.” Beyond individual connection, though, he also wanted to create a platform for African writers. The letters offer some insight into the very private Hughes and his generosity-though he was often broke, he sent gifts of money, books, records and even second-hand clothes to some of his even-poorer writer friends. During the process of compiling the anthologies, Hughes wrote at length and often warmly to several African writers. It was towards the latter part of his life, during the mid 1950s to early 1960s, that he sought short stories, poems and nonfiction essays from African writers, culminating in An African Treasury of 1960 and Poems from Black Africa of 1963. The more I read about Hughes, the more fascinating yet elusive a figure he became. But how else would he earn a living from writing, a feat few black people of that day had attempted anywhere? This endless loop made him-in his words-little more than “a literary sharecropper” indentured, in a sense, to the written word. Hughes was prolific and dabbled in various literary endeavors: poetry, short stories, children’s books, operas and frequent lectures and talks. ![]() Hughes’s poetry and writing emerged during a fabled slip of time: the Harlem Renaissance when jazz, art and writing emanated in a collective stream of black creativity and defiance. The question that has been asked by other artists (like Isaac Julien, in his film Looking for Langston) nagged at me too: who was Langston Hughes? Perhaps it was inevitable that I’d come to the letters at some point given the line of my enquiry, still, there seemed a certain serendipity, a literary alchemy. The exact piece is lost to me now, but it led to another, which led me to another, until, sitting at a library at the University of Witwatersrand one Johannesburg winter afternoon, I paged through a rare copy of Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation (The Correspondence) between the poet and several South African writers. This was a product of research: I was trying to solve a technical challenge I was having with my novel and must have come across an article about Langston Hughes’s visit to Shanghai, China-in part, the subject of my research-during the 1930s. Not in the manner of a haunting at least, nothing so thrilling. This biography will resurface Richard Rive the man and the writer, and invite us to think anew about how we read writers who lived and worked during the years of apartheid.It was during the writing of my second novel, a few months in, when an American writer who had passed away some 50 years earlier began persistently to enter my ambit. The biography follows Rive from his early years in the 1950s, writing for Drum magazine and spending time in the company of great anti-establishment writers such as Jack Cope, Ingrid Jonker, Jan Rabie, Marjorie Wallace, Es'kia Mphahlele and Nadine Gordimer, to his acceptance at Magdalene College, Oxford, where he completed his doctorate on Olive Schreiner, before returning to South Africa to resume his position as senior lecturer at Hewat College of Education. ![]() Using his own and others' memories, and drawing on Rive's fiction, Viljoen brings the author to life with sensitivity and empathy. Beneath these public personae lurked a constant and troubled awareness of his dark skin colour and guardedness about his homosexuality. In this biography Shaun Viljoen, a former colleague of Rive's, creates the composite qualities of a man who was committed to the struggle against racial oppression and to the ideals of non-racialism but was also variously described as irascible, pompous and arrogant, with a 'cultivated urbanity'. He is best known for his short stories written in the late 1950s and for his second novel, 'Buckingham Palace', District Six, in which he depicted the well-known cosmopolitan area of District Six, where he grew up. ![]() Richard Moore Rive (1930-1989) was a writer, scholar, literary critic and college teacher in Cape Town, South Africa.
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