As this work on Rive's life and work neared completion, I realised how many gaps there were in the narrative; how, like all biography, it is but a partial account. I had not got around to talking to some of Rive's closest friends who shared parts of his life – for example, Wilfred King, in whose home he spent many a Sunday, and Tony Kallis, who delivered a tribute at the private funeral held for Rive on 10 June 1989. I had spoken to John Ramsdale, but never finally captured the vivid and detailed stories that this old friend and fellow thespian had to tell of Rive's escapades as a young man. Nor did I capture the tales some of the talented storytellers who worked with Rive at Hewat College remember – those of Pieter ‘Pikes’ Smith and Graham Paulse, for example. I delayed listening to and utilising the wide range of interviews Kathleen Hauke did for the research on her biography on Rive before she died, and which her husband, Richard Hauke, so generously shared with me. I feared I would be sidetracked from my own account, and the plan to come to these interviews at the end of my own work never materialised in the end. Grace Musila, a collegue of mine at Stellenbosch University, grew up in Nairobi and recalls how she and fellow Kenyan high school pupils had read Rive's short story ‘ Resurrection’ as one of their prescribed texts in the early 1990s and had been moved by it. She raised the question of the impact of Rive's early work on a new generation of African intellectuals and readers, which I had not been able to explore more fully. Rowan Esau, the student who starred as Zoot in the Hewat production of Rive's ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six, generously gave me Rive's manuscript of a play script, which Rive in turn had given to him as a gift from master to young, doting admirer. The manuscript, composed not in the laborious typewriter script he had used for his doctoral thesis and earlier manuscripts, but on what must have been one of his first computers, is called ‘Dear Havelock’. It has only two characters, Olive Schreiner and Cecil John Rhodes, and imagines a series of exchanges between the two figures, as told by Schreiner in letters to Havelock Ellis. And so I could go on.