‘1961 and 1962 were prolific years for me,’ recalls Rive in his memoir. The 1960 Sharpeville and Langa uprisings had shaken the apartheid regime and once again exposed the brutal nature of the South African state to its people and to the world. The events gave Rive the setting for his first novel, Emergency, which he wrote in 1961 and 1962, and which was published by Faber and Faber in 1964. It was the first novel to be set against the backdrop of the Sharpeville crisis, and the first to be banned in South Africa. Rive overtly states that the life of the main character, Andrew Dreyer, ‘in some ways ran parallel to mine’. This autobiographically inflected protagonist finds himself in Cape Town in the maelstrom of the uprisings against the pass laws, organised by the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), from 28 to 30 March 1960. While these events provided creative impetus for Rive's first novel, they were also the start of a state of emergency in South Africa that lasted until the early 1970s and were a severe setback, not only for organised political resistance, but also for writers and artists in the country, who feared reprisals for freely expressing themselves. The fifteen year period from the mid-1960s to about 1980 also marked the leanest period in Rive's creative writing life.

In Emergency, Andrew Dreyer grows up in District Six and becomes a high school teacher. Dreyer's main dilemma in the novel – choosing greater political involvement in the struggle or escaping to safety – was in fact Rive's own dilemma at certain points in his life when the option of living abroad was open to him. In the novel, Dreyer decides to stay. His increasingly middle-class material circumstances, compared to those of his old friends who remained in the slums of his youth, and his ambivalent relationship to the struggle of working people can also be read to exemplify the uncertain relationship that Rive and many other members of the urban intelligentsia had towards mass struggle.