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.
From The New York Times Book Review:
"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."
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."
