By 1970, Rive's last major output of short stories had been in 1963, with the publication of African Songs. He published a short story called ‘Andrew’ in 1968,1 but it was ineffectual and really an extract from his novel Emergency. In 1969, the short story ‘Middle Passage’ was published in Contrast magazine. A few years later, Rive turned the story into a play, under the title Make Like Slaves and it was selected by Wole Soyinka, Lewis Nkosi and Martin Esslin for first prize in the 1971 second BBC African Service competition for new half-hour plays. Together with the eight other finalists, chosen from more than six hundred entries, it was included in Gwyneth Henderson's African Theatre: Eight Prize-Winning Plays for Radio in 1973. Make Like Slaves was produced as a BBC radio play and aired before the end of 1972. Perhaps this work reached the greatest number of Africans on the continent and around the world, given the popularity of radio and the BBC African Service at this time. English-speaking listenership for the BBC External Services (then the World Service) was, in the early 1970s, around 28 million listeners who tuned in at least once a week, and possibly half that number was in Africa.

The play was a two-hander, with the main characters called ‘He’ and ‘She’, and set in Cape Town, where a white woman is rehearsing a play about slavery in the black township of Nyanga. The play is intended for an international audience and repeats the stereotype of the African as exotic primitive. The woman feels she is not getting through to the black cast and seeks the help of the coloured writer, whom she feels would be closer to their world. He is irritated by the bleeding-heart liberalism of the woman but reveals his own isolation as a ‘brown’ man from the black community; he is more familiar with London and Paris than he is with his neighbours in Nyanga. Soyinka had this to say about the play: ‘It's a study of relationships, not only between the two characters, but between each character and the social reality each thought He or She understood.