The House at 6001: A Memoir of Uprising and Exile

Lebo Diseko, The House at 6001: A Memoir of Uprising and Exile (Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan, 2026)

‘WHAT was it all for?’ asks Joyce Diseko, revisiting Phefeni Junior Secondary School in Soweto in 2024 and looking at its now-decrepit state. In 1976 she had been a nineteen-year-old maths teacher barely older than her pupils and suddenly required to teach her subject in Afrikaans. Among many grievances this was the fuse that ignited a strike on 17 May. The Students Christian Movement provided cover for leaders such as Seth Mazibuko, a pupil at Phefeni, who enlisted the help of the Black Consciousness inspired South African Students Movement. At a meeting on Sunday 13 June, it was decided to call for marches converging at a mass protest in Orlando Stadium.

Joyce was at that Sunday meeting together with another teacher, Ohara Diseko a friend and her future sister-in-law, to give moral support. Plans were kept secret from the police and most parents and on Wednesday 16 June a sea of protestors, possibly 10,000 strong, assembled in Vilakazi Street. The police panicked, opened fire with live ammunition, and then went on the rampage. In the ensuing chaos Joyce and Ohara spent hours visiting police stations and morgues in search of missing schoolchildren. The action committee, including Mazibuko, Tsietsi Mashinini and Murphy Morobe, were soon on the run.

‘The Soweto Uprising shaped the trajectory of my family,’ writes Kealeboga Diseko, Joyce’s daughter. Her book is ‘the truth as I know it … an emotional journey back to a Wednesday in June 1976.’ In piecing together her parents’ story, she records the process of coming to terms with her own. Her father, Mathe Diseko, was not in Soweto for the uprising having been banned in 1973 as a young black consciousness activist; possibly the youngest person ever restricted in this way. He was wanted for terrorism, but the police bungled his arrest and he was able to skip the country into Botswana and exile in January 1976.

Soweto burned for days and the final death toll is unknown; certainly hundreds. Another march, this time to Johannesburg on 4 August, was halted by live ammunition and fatalities, and led to a general uprising. By mid-1977, half of Soweto’s school boards and 600 teachers had resigned. Joyce acted as a courier and informant for the ANC on visits to meet Mathe and in October they married. There were no photographs. He then announced he had been awarded a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford. She being pregnant and according to custom moved in with her in-laws at 6001 Hlisa Street, Orlando East where she spent two and a half years. Lebo was born in July 1977, two months before the murder of Steve Biko.

The core of her story lies with two key questions: given the context of the struggle and the increasingly complex nature of the violence after June 1976, why get married and have a baby? The answer is that maintaining as much normality as possible was a form of resistance as were the parties and socialising. Joyce worked for SACHED; and was involved in fund raising via township cinema and an over-optimistic jail break featuring a smuggled hacksaw blade. Her role with the ANC increasingly untenable, she left for exile in July 1979. Lebo went with her against the wishes of her paternal grandmother provoking a third, unanswerable, question: how would her life have panned out had she stayed?

Instead, she grew up in Oxford as a self-described mini-activist with an extraordinary level of confidence. At the age of ten she wrote to the Pitt Rivers Museum protesting at its use of the k-word in exhibit labels and received a courteous and positive response. She developed into what she regards as an ‘African with British sensibilities’, something that was to complicate her life. At the age of seven, she had been smuggled into South Africa by an aunt for a visit and seems at that point to have rejected African languages; understanding but replying in English. Her family was stateless, travelling on United Nations documents, perpetual students in limbo in a free but alien society. The coach to London gave access to political comrades and socialising.

The struggle was the dominant aspect of all their lives, but then her parents split up. After liberation, her mother was appointed to a diplomatic post in Sweden and Lebo went to boarding school in England. After a visit to South Africa in 1993, she decided to study at Wits University. Cultural differences, safety concerns and conservative attitudes added to the fact that she stood out as a young black woman with a Tswana name, British accent and only limited local vocabulary. By the time she was badly assaulted by her partner in 1999 she had developed a toxic relationship with the land of her birth and moved to London, the cosmopolitan place of exiles.

In spite of a diploma in broadcasting she had to endure a succession of mediocre jobs until achieving a breakthrough in 2009. She now works for the BBC focusing on international news and global religion, and was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard in 2024.

Writing her memoir, Lebo feels she was dealing with ‘fragments of a stained glass window’, her parents’ minds conditioned to forget and reluctant to open up even forty years later. Part of this was personal trauma, part the necessary secrecy of underground and exile work. And the struggle was a collective effort, so individual contributions were downplayed. These ingrained habits die hard.

‘Ordinary people did extraordinary things daily in the pursuit of freedom,’ she observes. That was replicated thousands of times during the struggle against apartheid; but there was a price to be paid, often by subsequent generations. This book provides particularly eloquent testimony to that truth.

Book review by Christopher Merrett, reproduced from his web page, From the Thornveld