The House at 6001 - Lebo Diseko

“Frankly, I was overwhelmed. I recorded a voice note to myself to help process and store an unedited version of my feelings. Months later I listened back to it and heard my voice break as I said, ‘They were just babies.

Chapter 1: Umntu Akalahlwa: The Months Before

“It wasn’t enough to see that something was wrong, her grandfather taught her. It was imperative to do something about it.

If you ask my mum today when she first became aware of apartheid, she will tell you it was a teenager, when she became involved with the Black Consciousness movement. But some of her earliest memories are of white police raiding homes in her neighbourhood looking for Black men who did not have permission to be in the area. At eight years old she watched as long lines of men shackled to each other were forced to walk the streets of the township, before being loaded into police vans.

Her grandma, a former domestic worker, had used her entrepreneurial skills to save up and buy a house in the multiracial area of Sophiatown in the years before my mum was born. When police and bulldozers forcibly moved more than 60 000 residents in February of 1955, the Mxakato family was deposited in Soweto’s Diepkloof Zone 1. Her grandma saved up once more, eventually buying the two-bedroom house that is still the family home. Back then it usually had around 15 people living in it; relatives from the Eastern Cape, friends or people who just needed a place to stay for a while.

From British author Enid Blyton’s Famous Five to the history of Europe, reading took them beyond the limited parameters that apartheid had drawn for them.

I asked her to expand, explaining that I was trying to understand what led us to having to leave. ‘I can’t go into those things, Kealeboga, because they belong in the domain of the African National Congress!’ she snapped. And so we continued, me trying to open the door, her letting me a tiny way in and then closing it. We ended the conversation saying ‘I love you’, but our nerves were frayed.