Emergency Continued

by Richard Rive

Overview

Emergency Continued takes as its starting point the tense relationship between older and younger generations of South African blacks in their decades long struggle against racism. 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.

Richard Rive is one of South Africa's most important black writers, giving a nuanced and humane view of family tensions in the face of oppression. Tragically his homophobic murder just after he completed this work meant that he did not live to see his country recover from racial strife to take its place as today's Rainbow Nation.

Writer Es'kia Mphahlele on Richard Rive: "He had more to give us. But we are profoundly grateful for the legacy Richard has left us: the treasures of his prodigious imagination, of his scholarship and the shining memory of his ample presence as a teacher in our midst."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781887378505
Publisher:	Readers International
Publication date:	08/20/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	324
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

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. 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."

Table of Contents

Acclaim for Emergency Continued

PART ONE

Letter to Abe

1-11

PART TWO

Letter to Abe

1-10

PART THREE

Letter to Abe

1-10

About the Author

About Readers International