Crossing the Line

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days, Crossing the Line is “The best book to…understand the agony of [apartheid]” –Norman Rush, New York Times Book Review

In this vivid memoir, Bill Finnegan recounts his coming of age as a high school teacher in apartheid-era South Africa, where he moves between privileged white neighborhoods, poverty-stricken townships, and remote coastlines that are almost, but never quite, above the fray. We witness up close the growing fury and political maturity of young people trapped in a violent, explicitly racist state at a time when their leaders were still in prison.

As school boycotts sweep through Cape Town in 1980, the fragile order of Finnegan’s classroom fractures. He gradually comes to understand that the best of intentions mean little in a structure as entrenched as apartheid, whose cruelties fall hardest on the students he teaches. After the school year ends, a hitchhiking journey from Cape Town to Johannesburg with one of his students, a committed militant, exposes him more fully to the complexities of the country and the scale and dedication of the underground resistance. The political idealism he inherited growing up in California feels inadequate, and he begins to see how distant outrage from abroad offers little comfort to those forced to live under apartheid daily.

In measured, deeply empathetic prose, Finnegan captures the human cost of one of the twentieth century’s great political tragedies, a system so normalized that its cruelties and absurdities become spectacles for distant observers. As he watches students “fall over the side,” unable to cross the systemic barriers to higher education, he realizes that the mechanisms governing life in South Africa cannot be reformed through determination or goodwill alone. Instead, bearing witness to the lives, ambitions, struggles, and inspired humor of his students may be the most meaningful thing he can offer.