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: