The great influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919, ‘the Spanish flu’ as it was called, is thought to have started in military camps in Kansas, in the United States. From there, it rapidly spread to the rest of the world killing, it is estimated, between 20 and 40 million people, more than had died in the five years of the First World War. The plague reached South Africa within months. In Cape Town, a vital stopover on the route of humans and goods between East and West, a young, married, working-class couple, Nancy and Joseph Rive, ‘coloured’ in the racialising language of the time, had started a modest home in the area of District Six, abutting the centre of the burgeoning port town at the base of the monumental Table Mountain. The area was created as Cape Town's sixth municipal district in 1867 and by the time Nancy and Joseph moved there, it was less of the edgy area once known for its crime and prostitution and was developing into a vibrant, cosmopolitan and mainly workingclass residential area. District Six was, however, like all land in the newly formed Union of South Africa, a contested space where white supremacy and resistance to racial oppression did battle. The ANC had been formed a few years earlier, in 1912, by African intellectuals, ‘bitter and betrayed’ by their exclusion from the common voters’ roll, while the white leadership of the new union divided the country into wealthier white and impoverished black areas with their 1913 Natives Land Act.

It was the District, as it was commonly known to locals, that was to become home to the young Richard Rive in the 1930s and early 1940s, but from which he quickly fled as a teenager to escape the constraints of his family circumstances and to make something of himself. It was the District, however, which would prove to be a perennial preoccupation of his imagination and would be intimately associated with his best work.

THE native peoples of South Africa share, with other simple races, the tendency to imitate European articles which take their fancy, using for their construction such local materials as may be suitable or available. This tendency has already been referred to in connexion with several varieties of musical instruments such as drums and whistles, and it is particularly interesting to observe how the fashioning of and performance upon indigenous instruments has remained practically uninfluenced by such imitations, which, untrammelled by taboos or ceremonial restrictions, seem to have always stood apart.

One type of these merits some consideration in a study of Native musical instruments, the imitation of the European violin. Undoubtedly at a very early date the violin was brought to South Africa, and was heard and marvelled at by the aborigines. It is hardly necessary to quote a long list of references to the employment of the instrument by European residents in the country; it will suffice to say that its use was widespread, though naturally it was in the more important settlements that the natives first met with it.

The Bushmen and the Hottentots appear to have been struck by the musical possibilities of the violin, and, since they were usually unable to purchase one, frequently attempted to construct specimens for themselves. A number of references to this practice occur throughout the writings of travellers and others.

Sparrman (1772-6) described a rudimentary attempt of this nature made by the Cape Hottentots. ‘T'Guthe is the name of another instrument, which, probably, was first made in imitation of a violin. It consists merely of a piece of board with three or four strings screwed on to it, on which they scrape with a bow.’ He adds, ‘I much doubt, whether the Boshies-men have either t'guthes or t'goerras [the gora] among them.’

Burchell (1811) gave details of the construction of a rather better instrument made by his Hottentot servant, Speelman, whose name is significant.

CRIME AND SOUTH AFRICA

Crime, especially violent and sexual crimes such as rape and murder, pose particular problems for the South African context. According to the South African Police Service (SAPS) Crime Statistics published for 2010, there were approximately 2 million reported crimes that year. Of the overall tally of crimes that took place in South Africa from April 2009 to March 2010, 16 834 occurrences were of murder and 68 322 of sexual crimes. Both of these crimes fall under the contact crime category of criminal acts, which accounts for 31.9% of total crimes reported in South Africa; murder accounts for 2.5% of all contact crimes and sexual crimes for 10% of all contact crimes.

Additionally, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's survey of international homicide rates for 2009 found that South Africa has a homicide rate of 36.5 per 100 000 population, ranking ninth internationally (UNODC, 2009). Murder as a sub-category of criminal behaviour consequently features prominently among important issues to be addressed in the South African context, and frequently as an issue of considerable concern in the daily lives of South Africans.

Working therapeutically with criminal populations poses challenges both in terms of developing effective strategies for pre-emptively addressing psychological and social factors that increase vulnerability to criminal behaviour, as well as providing rehabilitative interventions for individuals already incarcerated or apprehended. Psychoanalytic theory and approaches have provided a plethora of texts and formulations of personality structure together with the defence mechanisms and ego functioning of the criminal and, notably, the antisocial personality (Bluestone & Travin, 1984), but they are still relatively deficient in providing suggestions as to how one may work therapeutically with such individuals, if this is at all possible. The majority of existing and early psychoanalytic literature in this area emphasised intrapsychic factors, especially libidinal and aggressive drives and the role of the superego, and neglected the role played by contextual factors and the external world. Fitzpatrick (1976) describes a change in psychoanalytic studies of criminal motivation as shifting to encompass contextual diversity in the manifestation of antisocial character, as well as emphasising the etiological significance of character development, adaptational functions of the ego and the role played by environment.

Innovative assessment procedures, which take into account contextual factors such as language, culture, education, socio-economic status and recent educational policy developments, are needed in South Africa. In the democratic South Africa, Education White Paper 6 (Department of Education, 2001) calls for assessment practices that are less expert-driven, non-deficit-focused and linked to curriculum support. The Initial Assessment Consultation (IAC) approach, which is the focus of this chapter, encompasses and attempts to address these needs. This shared problem-solving approach to child assessment has at its core a focus on collaboration with parents and caregivers, as well as with significant others such as teachers, with the purpose of facilitating learning and the empowerment of clients. The approach is based on a sound philosophical and theoretical foundation and is a departure from the belief that assessment and intervention are discrete clinical procedures.

The IAC approach to child assessment, which represents a paradigm shift in assessment practice, was initially developed by Adelman and Taylor (1979) at the Fernald Institute at the University of California to address prevailing criticisms of conventional assessment procedures. For more than two decades, the IAC family participation and consultation model of assessment has been adapted and implemented at the University of the Witwatersrand. The key principles of the IAC approach are applied by many local professionals and training institutions that work within the assessment, remedial and educational fields. Research has supported the usefulness of this holistic and egalitarian form of assessment (Amod, 2003; Amod, Skuy, Sonderup & Fridjhon, 2000; Levin, 2003; Manala, 2001; Skuy, Westaway & Hickson, 1986; Warburton, 2008), which mirrors the more democratic environment of post-apartheid South Africa, with its endorsement of human rights, its sensitivity towards cross-cultural differences and its changing educational policies on assessment practice.

Background to the IAC approach

The IAC model provides an optimal and broad framework for assessment practice. Adelman and Taylor (1983; 1993; 2010) reject the reductionist view of behavioural, emotional and learning problems as reflecting internal deficits and pathology within the individual.

This chapter provides an introduction to the theoretical concepts that underlie projective assessment and includes a brief history of projective testing. The current debates in the literature that surround projective assessment are outlined, and the limitations of projective tests are discussed in relation to research conducted into the reliability and validity of various projective tests. The criticisms levelled against these tests are balanced against arguments for their clinical utility. The prevalence of this form of testing in clinical practice, internationally and in South Africa, is briefly discussed, as is the use of this form of testing in adult and child populations. The use of these tests in forensic settings is also briefly addressed; however, research into the cross-cultural validity of this form of testing is a central focus of the chapter. Common problems relating to the cross-cultural use of these Westernised assessment measures are also outlined. A discussion of the fact that clinical practice often precedes research regarding adaptations in the use of tests is included, and clinical illustrations of adapted interpretations accounting for socio-economic and cultural variations are described. The necessity for socio-cultural awareness in mental health practitioners in relation to this form of testing is highlighted.

The scope of projective assessment

Projective assessment refers to the measurement of personality traits or characteristics, using instruments in which the stimulus is a task or activity that is vague or ambiguous. These tests allow for a less restricted response from the person being assessed than the limited choice of responses usually associated with objective personality measures, such as ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘sometimes’ or a Likert scale. Typically, when using projective assessments, a task such as responding to an image, telling a story about a picture, completing an unfinished sentence or drawing a picture is presented to a person who is then required to generate a response, with minimal external guidance or constraints imposed on the nature of that response. The assumption that underlies these tests is that when a person is called upon to generate a response in the face of ambiguity, the person projects elements of her personal characteristics into her response (Meyer & Kurtz, 2006).

Africa joined three other continents in the twentieth century's experiment in Marxist–Leninist governance. The first African regimes to claim Marxism as one source of inspiration were established in the late 1950s with the commencement of the European decolonisation of Africa, some forty years after Russia's October Revolution. The first orthodox Marxist–Leninist regimes appeared in the early 1960s, with the orthodox tide cresting in the mid- to late 1970s. The Marxist– Leninist regimes dissolved at the beginning of the 1990s, their dissolution by then just one moment in the global ‘collapse of communism’. These regimes are of enduring historical interest, but their experience also yields lessons for those seeking a progressive or egalitarian way forward for twenty-first-century Africa.

The experience of Marxist–Leninist governance was disastrous by virtually any defensible metric. The lessons it offers for contemporary social democrats and democratic socialists are thus largely negative. New generations of activists and intellectuals in South Africa and elsewhere often seem too ready to forget or deny these in their rush to embrace slogans, concepts and iconography reminiscent of authoritarian rather than democratic socialism.

Bearing in mind both the historical interest value of Africa's Marxist regimes and the need, more than two decades after their demise, to learn what we can from their failures, I offer below seven theses about Africa's Marxist–Leninist governments and the movements undergirding them.

The theses refer to the doctrines and practices of parties, movements and political currents that claimed to be Marxist and were guided to a significant degree by particular interpretations of Marxist theory. The chapter does not address academic Marxism, and it sidesteps the question of whether these regimes were ‘truly’ Marxist, whether they correctly interpreted the canon or indeed whether it constitutes a category error to refer to a regime as Marxist (as opposed to, say, popular-democratic or socialist). I do, however, conclude with some critical comments on Marxist theory as such and take the view that Marxist theory is probably implicated, along with other factors, in the failure of the ‘Marxist regimes’.

THESIS ONE

There was no clear qualitative difference between the levels of radicalism displayed by the Marxist–Leninist regimes and the preceding African socialist ones.

The etymological basis of the word ethics is the Greek word ethos, which, when it is translated into English, means a set of moral principles (Pharos, 2010). According to Leach and Oakland (2007), the first official document ever to express the need for imposing rules that would govern professional behaviour was the Code of Hammurabi (circa 1795–1750 BCE). Their research revealed that the Hippocratic Oath (circa 400 BCE) was the first known example of a professionally generated code of ethics. In 1958, the American Psychological Association (APA) established the first ethical code for psychologists (Leach & Oakland, 2007). Since then, many countries have developed ethical codes addressing issues associated with psychological practice and psychological assessment. South Africa is one of many countries that have produced an ethical code largely influenced by the 2002 APA code (Leach & Oakland, 2007). The South African code is published under the heading ‘Rules of Conduct Pertaining Specifically to Psychology’ by the Professional Board for Psychology, which falls under the auspices of the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) (HPCSA, 2010a).

Louw (1997a) perceives the existence of a South African code as evidence of the intention of local psychologists to adhere to professional standards of practice. He notes that such a code is a defining characteristic of the discipline and serves as proof that psychology in South Africa deserves its scientific status. Since the Professional Board for Psychology falls under the auspices of the HPCSA, clients are legally protected against any possible harm and control is exerted over the conduct of assessment practitioners. Despite an ongoing debate over the feasibility of these institutions in South Africa (AfricaRights, 2007a; 2007b), it should be noted that international commentators advocate the existence of statutory control no matter what the type or form (Hall, Howerton & Bolin, 2005; ITC, 2001; Leach & Oakland, 2007).

In South Africa there are various forms of legislation that contribute to psychological assessment in some form.

THE publication of Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa represents an impulse to re-animate the Scottish-born Percival Robson Kirby's important early text in southern African music studies. The changes to the revised third edition include reworking the musical examples, designing the layout so that the discussion and photographs of instruments are near each other, and changing the title; Kirby's original phrase ‘native races’ has been replaced by ‘indigenous people’. This revised third edition affords an opportunity to reconsider a classic, stimulating early study of the material culture of indigenous southern African musics nearly 80 years after Kirby's book first appeared on bookshelves in 1934, and 45 years since it was last published.

Starting as early as 1923, Kirby turned his erudition and powers of observation to studying the music cultures of indigenous South Africans through a series of field trips during university vacations. He developed a project to collect, document and describe examples of each kind of musical instrument in southern Africa south of the Limpopo. He employed photography, ably assisted by Dr W. Paff, and made wax cylinder sound recordings of many performances as part of his method, and also learnt to perform the music. This practice later became standard in ethnomusicology, but was uncommon at the time. The tremendous energy he expended in this work resulted in a series of articles and the first edition of book. He displayed many of the instruments he collected in his ‘museum’ in the music department at the University of the Witwatersrand, using them in his teaching. On retiring from Wits, Kirby loaned his collection to the Africana Museum, Johannesburg. It remained there from 1953 to 1981, when the University of Cape Town acquired it. Today it is housed in the university's South African College of Music, with the accompanying materials deposited in the University of Cape Town Libraries’ Manuscripts and Archives Department.

The best way to read this book is in conjunction with viewing the instruments he discusses in this collection, which can be done by arrangement with the South African College of Music.

These words of Wendy Petersen, senior principal of the Baragwanath Nursing College from 1954 to 1963, capture the way that the white nursing establishment and hospital administration characterised the role of black nurses in South Africa. The notion that nurses would bring to the world not only good health but also ‘light’ – which here implies a Western-educated outlook – runs through the history of black nursing in South Africa and across the continent. Nursing was one of the most important avenues for African women to enter paid employment and find independent careers yet very little has been written on the history of nursing in South Africa; about how black nurses saw their role; what inspired and motivated them; their perspectives on nursing; or how nurses functioned within the hospital system during apartheid. This chapter shows the important role that nurses played in the history of Baragwanath. Nurses were the backbone of the hospital, the most numerous of the staff, and a group without whom all services at the hospital would have ground to a halt. A focused discussion of nurses at Baragwanath brings the voices of individual, mostly black, nurses to the fore and gives us insight into how they acted in the contradictory settings of the apartheid state. Within structures that sought to oppress black people, especially women, nursing offered them access to the labour market and increasing status and responsibility, albeit as part of the framework of racial segregation and separate development. The number of black nurses at Baragwanath continued to rise throughout the apartheid era.

The student revolts of 1976 were the most dramatic and visible sign of the manner in which the balance of power was starting to shift from the apartheid state, which had held firm control of the nation since the Sharpeville crisis of 1960, to the forces opposing it. In the aftermath of the 1976 crisis, the apartheid rulers devised new strategies to attempt to maintain control: the creation of independent homelands was intended to allow black people to hold ‘citizenship’ and a measure of administrative power; the 1983 Constitution Act established a ‘tricameral’ parliament, in which Indians and coloureds would have their own legislative houses and which was to replace the all-white legislature. For public service professionals such as Rive, one of the consequences of this strategy to divide and co-opt was that salaries suddenly increased dramatically at the start of the 1980s. But while this widened an existing class divide within oppressed communities – between professionals and skilled workers on the one hand and the mass of semi-skilled and unemployed workers on the other – it failed to buy the allegiance of most intellectuals and activists. The majority of leaders of the oppressed remained implacably opposed to the government's offer of sham citizenship and power sharing.

By the early 1980s there was widespread mobilisation of workers, students and activists in South Africa against the various policies of the state. Among the liberation movements at home and in exile there was a simultaneous increase in confidence. In the Cape, the Federation of Cape Civic Associations (FCCA), a broad front of neighbourhood civic organisations that were resuscitated or established in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was founded by Victor Wessels and his comrades early in 1979, the same year as Wessels's untimely death. Rive made numerous contributions to the activities of a number of FCCA affiliates in the early 1980s, oft en presenting talks on poetry or literature for high school students. He used to have his notes inked on small, ruled index cards and used these as prompts during these talks. The formation in 1983 of the United Democratic Front (UDF), an internal federation of organisations broadly supporting the African National Congress (ANC), was the most popular and visible manifestation of this increasingly organised opposition.

The year 1963 was a watershed for Rive in terms of making a name for himself as a writer and this coincided with months of intensive travel and adventure. At thirty-three he was travelling outside of South Africa for the first time. From December 1962 to September 1963, he travelled up the coast of southern Africa by boat and then through Africa, on to southern Europe and finally to London. The trip was funded by a Farfield Foundation Fellowship secured for him by Es'kia Mphahlele. Mphahlele had decided to leave South Africa in 1957, and in 1963 was director of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris. Rive mentions that this Congress was ‘an American-based organisation … [whose] purpose was to combat the cultural inroads of communism, but no-one in the organisation seemed to take that aspect seriously’. Here Rive skims over a controversy of which he was aware, as later in his memoir he admits to the Congress being ‘reputed to have accepted funding from the Central Intelligence Agency’; the Congress was in fact funded by the CIA as a way of soliciting pro-Western sympathy from writers in anglophone Africa, who were perceived to be more radically critical of the West than their assimilated francophone counterparts. The Farfield Foundation had also helped to fund the establishment of the literary journal The Classic in Johannesburg, at the start of the 1960s. Rive took his cue for a strategic involvement with the Congress from Mphahlele, rather than from his political associates in the NEUM, who would have suggested he refuse such collaboration. He would continue to find himself in such ‘compromising’ positions and his decisions seemed to be guided by his belief that a writer should be independent of any party political line even as he aligned himself ideologically with particular NEUM positions. In deciding to accept the funding, he risked being seen as a CIA spy and being ostracised by more radical friends at home. This perhaps accounts for the silent treatment he got from some of the writers in exile, such as Todd Matshikiza, whom he met up with on the London leg of his trip.

In this chapter South African subjectivities and identities will be explored. Mama defines subjectivity as ‘the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world’ (1995: 2). She argues that subjectivity is constructed through the ‘constant resonance between psychodynamics and social experience’ (1995: 133). Historically, psychologists have tended to address identity and subjectivity at the micro level, focusing on a particular individual patient and how she1 sees herself at both the conscious and the unconscious levels, how her subjectivity developed and the interventions which could be used to help her to expand and transform her sense of identity. This approach has been critiqued in recent years and a new crop of analytic theorists have argued that we cannot understand the individual separate from her social milieu and that individual and social factors are inter-implicated in the development of subjectivity and identity (see Dimen, 2011).

Questions about how identity should be defined are especially evocative in the South African context. In apartheid South Africa the state played a particularly obtrusive role in the constitution of subjectivities, which made it patently obvious that identity was not simply an individual choice. Under apartheid, the government ‘went to macabre lengths to distinguish groups by race’ (Orkin & Jowell, 2006: 284) and racial identity was externally imposed on all individuals, who were defined as either ‘white’ or ‘non-white’ (Africans, Indians, Asians, coloureds). Ethnicity/race was elevated as the superordinate category for defining identity in the apartheid state, which also ‘denied a sense of “South Africanness” to the majority of citizens’ (Grossberg et al., 2006: 72). The government ‘enforced social and spatial segregation between ethnic groups both to satisfy the dominant ideology and to ensure differential access to resources and power’ (Orkin & Jowell, 2006: 284). The doctrine of white supremacy had a profoundly negative impact on individuals who were classified as not ‘white’, an impact that affected both their material circumstances and their psyche and self-evaluations (Biko, 1970, 1971). Those classified as ‘white’ under apartheid reaped material benefits, but their sense of identity was also racialised and circumscribed.

Critique, we have recently been told, has ‘run out of steam’, making it a poor weapon for engaging in contemporary theoretical battles. Worse still, not only does critique appear blunted, even anachronistic, but the enemy is wise to the critical trick and has turned its back on ‘our’ forces. Field marshals of the academy are even calling for a regrouping, a new assessment of the strategic disposition that has come down to us via the critical tradition (see Latour 2004).

Today, even in politics, there is less patience for interventions that take a critical form (and which cannot always be dismissed as a capitulation to power). For instance, in my own experience, criticism of dominant political narratives and practices are often met with the objection: ‘Your criticisms are all very well and good, but what does it say about the alternative?’

If we (sometimes) concede the sincerity of such statements, and admit the need to direct ourselves towards finding an alternative, why should we bother with critique? ‘Write all the critical words you want,’ they might even say, ‘but it's the new world that we're really interested in.’

By presenting the problem in these terms, I do not mean to suggest that we all, and always, mean the same thing when we talk about critique or criticism. Summarising the wide spectrum of practices that go under the name ‘critique’, a recent contribution by Michael Hardt (2011: 19) speaks of ‘relatively generic means of fault-finding; methods to question the truth of authority; techniques to reveal the figures of power that operate in dominant discourses or ideologies; and even specific Kantian procedures of investigating the human understanding, reason, or judgment’. Nevertheless, for Hardt (2011: 19), in spite of the differences between ways of doing critique – conceived in his paper as the primary mode of practising theory as political intervention – they all remain open to the charge of being ‘insufficient as political methods in so far as they lack the capacity both to transform the existing structures of power and create alternative social arrangements’.

This chapter explores the practice and cross-cultural application of two thematic projective techniques, the Children's Apperception Test (CAT) and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). A brief introduction to, and definition of, thematic storytelling techniques is followed by discussions on reliability and validity, test administration and clinical application. The chapter has a strong focus on clinical application within a South African context and provides guidelines for clinicians. The focus on case material also allows the utility of these tests to be illustrated in depth.

The development of apperception testing

The origin of projective testing was Herman Rorschach's (1924a; 1924b) accidental discovery that people automatically and unconsciously project their own hidden desires, fears, wishes, feelings, conflicts and attitudes onto unstructured stimuli. As with individual interpretations given to a work of art, so we canvas our experiences, perceptions and reflections from an internal palette. He termed this process ‘apperception’ (Rorschach, 1924b, p.359). The concept ‘projection’, however, developed from Freud's (1938) theory of the unconscious and of the consequent use of projection as a defence. Freud conceived of the unconscious as a repository of instincts, wishes and fantasies deemed unacceptable to consciousness, thereby becoming the object of repression, hidden from conscious awareness. These unacceptable feelings and impulses are projected outside the self so that, for example, a group of people are experienced in a certain way that is more telling of the subject than of the other. To quote Freud, ‘experience shows that we understand very well how to interpret in other people … the same acts which we refuse to acknowledge as being mental in ourselves’ (1955, p.171). Projective assessments are therefore administered to describe a person's subjective experience of him- or herself, and relationships with others and the world, often in response to queries about the psychological underpinnings of reported emotional and/or behavioural problems, or to assist with diagnosing emotional disturbances.

Morgan and Murray (1935) also referred to the process as ‘apperception’ and described a technique for investigating fantasies in their introduction to the TAT. Subsequent to this initial introduction, the TAT has seen numerous revisions, inclusion of scoring systems and development of an apperception test specifically tailored for use with children (Bellak, 1944; 1954; 1971; 1975; 1986; 1993; Bellak & Abrams, 1997; Bellak & Bellak, 1949; 1965).

The expression ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent’, which appears as an epigraph on the title page of the work History Beyond Trauma by psychoanalysts Davoine and Gaudilliere (2004), underscores a key theme of this chapter – and indeed of psychoanalysis – that there is much beneath the surface: the silenced, the erased, the unspeakable have ways of making their presence felt. Taken at an individual level, this is a truism of psychoanalytically oriented approaches to clinical practice. However, if individuals are understood as sociohistorically constituted, situated in genealogy and history, ancestrally located, the possibility of life narratives animated by spectral presences, or what Garon (2004) calls ‘skeletons in the closet’, takes on new significance.

I share the concern of Nuttall and Coetzee, and many of the contributors to their book Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, that ‘the push to forget the past and to look to a new future’ (1998: 1) runs the risk of creating a privileged version of history that will leave stories untold, many citizens severed from their socio-historical and ancestral lineages, and skeletons lurking in the nation's closet. A key thesis of psychoanalysis is that ghostly presences inevitably return in some form, and this revenant (cf. Derrida, 1994) can be highly consequential both for individuals and for societies. The eruption of war in the Balkans in the early 1990s, predicated in part on a resurrection of the humiliation of the Serbian people at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, serves as a salutary reminder of the longevity and mischief-making capabilities of unacknowledged or suppressed spectres, particularly those that involve some combination of loss, trauma, humiliation and shame. In arguing for a psychoanalysis of the social, I am, therefore, arguing for a psychoanalysis of the spectral.

There is great anxiety in South Africa about reopening the wounds of apartheid. The rhetoric of a ‘rainbow nation’ offers hope for unity and national identity. The problem, as De Kok (1998) reminds us, is that the custody of memory is highly contested.

It was the discovery of the writers of the American Harlem Renaissance – Rive mentions in particular Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer and Cedric Dover – that allowed the young Rive to find representations in literature that spoke more directly to his own dilemmas and contexts, and to break the illusion that books were for and about ‘White Folks’. In ‘On Being a Black Writer in South Africa: A Personal Essay’, Rive claims to have first encountered the work of Langston Hughes when he read The Ways of White Folks at the age of twelve, a book he found on the shelves of the Hyman Liberman Institute Library in Muir Street, District Six: ‘A new world opened up. This was about me and depicted my frustrations and resentments in a world obsessed with colour.’ One senses here Rive's epiphanic moment, a moment of self-discovery that changed his life as a writer and his very sense of self. It is also fascinating that Rive captures this turning point in an image that echoes the isolated Miranda's excitement at glimpsing a ‘brave new world’ in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Unlike a writer such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who tried to effect a radical break from the English canon and its prevailing humanist assumptions in order to establish an independent African aesthetic, even attempting to move away from using the English language in creative work, Rive comfortably and consciously asserted his identity as an African writer, as he simultaneously claimed the great English literary tradition and the English language as his own.

The influence of the black American writers of the Harlem Renaissance was also refracted through the work of the writer who most directly influenced the whole Drum school of writers, Peter Abrahams. Mphahlele makes the point that the previous writing tradition by black authors located itself in folklore, in the oral past, in the (oft en Christian) allegory, the didactic and in the epic; it was with Thomas Mofolo, Herbert Dhlomo, RRR Dhlomo and AC Jordan that elements of realism were being favoured in work by black writers. Mphahlele continues: