The South Africa Rive found when he disembarked was markedly different in mood to the one he had left three years earlier. The iron grip of the Nationalists had started to weaken and the first signs of a widespread resurgence of both organised and spontaneous resistance to the state had appeared on a number of fronts. Armed resistance to colonial and imperial rule had intensified on the southern African subcontinent and elsewhere – America was in retreat in Vietnam and armed struggle, particularly in the Portuguese colonies, was intensifying in Africa. In South Africa, the working class, consolidated by the rapid industrialisation of the 1960s, solidified into a number of militant union formations that began to rattle the cage of National Party rule.

On the literary front, the new mood of defiance and selfassertion was expressed through the work of a new generation of poets who came to be known as the ‘Soweto poets’ – Mbuyiseni (Oswald) Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, Sipho Sepamla and Mafika Pascal Gwala. Rive describes their work in a way that both connects them to his generation but also recognises their independent contribution: ‘Their writings were as strident and declamatory as those of the Protest School of the 1950s and early 1960s, but this time the form was different, poetry as opposed to prose.’ Writing Black recounts his meetings with each of the Soweto poets in terms that reflect his admiration for their work, particularly for Sepamla and Gwala, as well as revealing his sense of excitement at the growing family of black writers in the country. The title of Rive's memoir is an echo of both the assertive mood of the work of these poets and the growing influence of the Black Consciousness Movement.

After resuming his normal working life, Rive continued to be active in school sports and it was in this regard that Alf Wannenburgh contacted him during this period. As a journalist for the Sunday Times, Wannenburgh had been asked to edit a page reporting on ‘coloured’ sport, as the newspaper had until then depicted only white sporting events.