William Finnegan - Crossing the Line, A Year in the Land of Apartheid (1994).pdf - cdeygran

Preferred Citation: Finnegan, William. Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of

Apartheid. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1994.

http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1779n73z/

Crossing the Line

A Year in the Land of Apartheid

William Finnegan

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford

For Caroline

Preferred Citation: Finnegan, William. Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of

Apartheid. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1994.

http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1779n73z/

For Caroline

PREFACE TO THE 1994 EDITION

Surely the word "miraculous" was never more cruelly overworked by the

world's journalists and politicians than in the weeks surrounding the election

and inauguration of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela as the first black president of

South Africa. There simply didn't seem to be another word to describe the

arrival of non-racial democracy in the land of apartheid. Only five years

before, anyone suggesting that the peaceful abolition of white-minority rule

was imminent would have been dismissed as naive. But then, through a

sudden and remarkable confluence of forces and events, of far-sighted

leaders and blind luck, the historic deadlock was broken. And on May 10,

1994, power was formally handed over to the elected representative of the

South African majority, a man who had spent twenty-seven years in prison

for his political beliefs. Before a vast and ecstatic audience that included

forty-five heads of state, President Mandela declared, "Out of the experience

of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long must be born a

society of which all humanity will be proud." For much of the world, the

transformation of South Africa was clearly a moment of rare political

transcendence.

But the South African revolution was neither quick nor peaceful nor magic. It

was, in truth, a long, ragged, violent process, quite unabetted by the

supernatural. More than twenty thousand lives were lost to political violence

in the last decade of white rule alone. And things would have been far worse

if the two main contestants for power—the apartheid regime and the African

National Congress, the liberation movement led by Mandela—had decided to

fight it out rather than negotiate the transition to democracy. Still, the

demise of the apartheid state bore little resemblance to, say, the historically

adjacent collapse of the Soviet empire, with its huge, gentle, serial

implosions (which also helped speed political change in Pretoria). The

ferocious libera-

― x ―

tion wars fought earlier in Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe bore even

less resemblance, blessedly, to the ultimate form taken by the freedom

struggle in South Africa. Those were each straightforward, old-fashioned

decolonizations. The South African revolution was always destined to be—

and in the end it was—something new under the sun.

This book is about one season in that long, slow-motion revolution. It is also,

to a large extent, about one community: a high school in Cape Town.

(Although this is a factual account, the names, and in some cases the

appearances, of the people described in it—apart from public figures—have

been changed. In 1986, when Crossing the Line was first published, this

precaution was made necessary by a reign of state terror. Now, in 1994,

considerations of privacy lead me to retain the altered names.) Since it is my

own experience of that time and place that provides the main narrative

chain, this is inevitably a book about something else as well: the education

of a young American. So the microcosm of South African life offered here is

both highly random and highly subjective. And yet it also seems filled with

serendipity, for when I lived and worked in Cape Town I found myself

thrown in with some exceptional people, and it was really my fascination

with them that inspired this attempt to write about their world.

As luck would have it, I was back in Cape Town for the liberation election of

April, 1994. The voting lasted three days, and on each of those mornings I

awoke to shouts of joy, for my hotel window overlooked the back door of a

voting station in Lansdowne, a "non-white" area east of the city, and many

of the early-morning voters emerging from the polling booths expressed

their feelings with cries, hollers, whoops, and piercing African ululations.

Nearly all of them were, of course, voting for the first time in their lives. One

distinguished-looking man in his fifties bellowed, "At last I am a human

being!" More than a few people appeared to be weeping. Throughout the

country, ordinary South Africans seemed acutely aware that they were

participating in an epochal event. The political violence that had taken so

many lives ceased completely during the election period. The innumerable

irregularities and breakdowns in the balloting, the charges and

countercharges of fraud among the parties, were all overshadowed by the

immense patience and purposefulness of the voters. The perpetual victims,

the silent millions, were making their voices heard at last.

And South Africa is, as a result, already a profoundly different country from

the repressive, white-supremacist state described in this book. The mass

psychosis of official racism has been finally treated and cured. The "line" that

I used to cross each day, between the

― xi ―

whites-only neighborhoods where I was obliged to live and the black school

where I taught, has been legally and morally erased.

At the same time, the country is startlingly unchanged. Residential and

educational segregation are, I found this year, still virtually total. At the

school where I was a teacher, I found my former classroom more decrepit

and ill-supplied than ever. The traditionally white schools, meanwhile, had

never looked more lush and pristine. This, remember, was four years after

apartheid was officially abolished. The structures of racial privilege in all

areas of South African life run extremely deep, and the new, ANC-led

government faces a truly staggering task. Even the country's political

culture, for all its achievements and the world's hopes, will not become a

liberal democracy overnight. Authoritarianism has been the local political

style for centuries, and the values of tolerance and respect for human rights

are as fragile as they are new. But the most daunting challenge of all,

perhaps, resides in the extreme and worsening poverty of millions of black

South Africans. This rising social and economic crisis cast, I thought, a deep

shadow across the historic elections. Democracy, after all, seldom thrives

where hunger, homelessness, landlessness, and unemployment are

rampant.

Thus, while I wish I could say that this book is about only some of the bad

old days of apartheid—a few scenes from that "extraordinary human disaster

that lasted too long"—South Africa's recent (and less recent) past will not be

so easily left behind. Most of the oppressive legislation described in these

pages has been repealed, and some of the numbers used to illustrate

conditions in the 1980s may now be favorably revised. But the terms of

most peoples' lives are in fact largely unchanged. And the latest figures

available for crucial aspects of everyday life, such as poverty and public

health, are actually worse than those of a few years ago.

An epilogue, revised and expanded for this edition, will bring the story of the

South African revolution up to date—in summary form, of course. The

epilogue will also set forth the further adventures of some of the book's

major characters. As for miracles: if I have encountered any in my travels in

South Africa, they were surely made manifest, it strikes me now, in the

simple, unaffected courage, humor, and kindness of some of the people I

came to know there. These sweet souls know who they are, and readers will

gather whom I mean.

― xiii ―

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first debt is to my students at Grassy Park High, who never seemed to

tire of teaching me about their country, and to those other South Africans,

many of whom appear in this book, whose friendship and patience made all

the difference. In the United States, Kevin Finnegan, Caroline Rule, Gay

Seidman, Cherryl Walker, Jane Foress-Betty, and Nicholas Wellington read

Crossing the Line in manuscript and made many valuable suggestions.

Though writing primarily about my own experience, I have relied on the

work of many other writers and scholars, and want at least to acknowledge

Frank Molteno's "The Schooling of Black South Africans and the 1980 Cape

Town Student Boycott: A Sociological Interpretation" (M.A. thesis, University

of Cape Town, 1983), Marianne Cornevin's Apartheid: power and historical

falsification (Paris: Unesco, 1980), and John Western's indispensable

Outcast Cape Town (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981). I

would also like to thank Terry Karten, Aaron Asher, Jean Naggar, Jo-Anne

Rosen, my agent Amanda Urban, and, at the University of California Press,

Charlene Woodcock and Linda Norton. My deepest thanks, finally, to the

people whose love and faith made writing this book possible: Bryan Di

Salvatore, Caroline Rule, and my parents, William and Patricia Finnegan.

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