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.