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.