The House at 6001

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.

I was asking the people I love to relive the utterly horrific and explain to me how they felt about that horror, to tell me what it did to them on the inside. To reveal the feelings they’d had to not feel in order to survive. My lack of understanding is a luxury paid for by the experience they lived

I wanted us to be normal. An impossible ask when the people who raised me were so shaped by an abnormal system. They carried survivors’ guilt and memories no one should ever have. Sometimes my mum talked to me about the children she had taught before she had left Soweto. The ones who marched on the streets on June 16. She told me about Hector and I knew that he was 12 years old like me. I had seen the photo of him dying. I knew, too, that my mum was on Vilakazi Street that day, along with the kids who called her ‘Teacher’ and ‘Ma’am’.

I think that my parents would like me to know how they contributed to our freedom. My professional skill and proximity to the primary sources should make telling their story an achievable task. But all my elders were trained in forgetting. Some of this was struggle discipline. Some of it was survival. And then there is the passage of time, decades in which some memories were lost entirely and others faded to the point that they can barely be seen.

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.

Chapter 2: ‘His Poems Are Seditious in Nature’: The Man Who Connected Them All

“Over the years, I have heard my uncles and aunts talk about the poetry my dad used to write. It had assumed a kind of legendary status in our family, but reading these documents was the first time I had actually seen it. I was surprised at how much it read, to me, like what it is — the writing of someone barely out of their teens. An intelligent person, with a great command of English, for sure. But words that could bring down a state? I still can’t get my head around it. I suppose that is the thing with repressive regimes. Any dissent must be totally stamped out. Even the words of someone as young as my dad. They say that you manifest what you fear, and the government did just that with my dad. He wasn't actively planning a revolution before his banning but he would do so afterwards.

’Waar is jou pas?’ the officer barked. My grandfather showed his booklet, but the police said something was wrong. The next thing my dad remembers is being at the police station in Orlando, where he sat waiting, helpless, as his father was taken to another room and sjamboked. Finally, my grandfather was let go. He and my dad walked home in silence. They never spoke about it, or the myriad other daily degradation they experienced. They buried the pain and kept going.

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.

His answer was one of the most impassioned responses that he gave. Under apartheid, he said, his whole life was a humiliation. ‘There is no price too high for one’s dignity, because without it you have nothing at all.’ Yes. He would do it all again.

Chapter 3: A Coming Storm: The Days Before

“That same afternoon, Super passed by his uncle Elliot Shabangu’s house in Dube. Elliot was a trade unionist who’d long been run-ins with the authorities. It was seeing him being harassed by police that first drew Super to the Struggle. Elliot was a mentor to his nephew and to Zweli, who had tagged along. As they visit drew to a close, they walked down the path that led to the wire gate and stood chatting. When Elliot mentioned that he might see his nephew the following day for a family-related matter, Super turned to his uncle and said, ‘No, tomorrow we’ll be out protesting.

The lies told about God's Word in order to build a case for racism led my dad and his siblings to reject Christianity, but the values of his parents’ faith – courage, perseverance, love, and order – permeated 6001 and the lives of those in it. My grandfather was soft-spoken and rarely raised his voice, but made his views known. My grandmother was a disciplinarian. She didn't shout but was a straight shooter. My uncles and aunts knew their parents supported their political activities, yet they didn’t think of their mum and dad as revolutionaries in their own right.

Chapter 5: The Deaths They Could Not Grieve: The Aftermath

“It was Johannesburg's Black daily newspaper The World, where photographer Sam Nzima worked, that printed the photo of Hector dying in Mbuyisa Makhubu’s arms. They almost didn’t, as the desk editor was afraid that it might spark civil war. Eventually the paper’s editor, Percy Qoboza, made the decision and the paper placed it on the front page. It earned them a visit from the police, and the photo was banned. Sam was visited by officers at his home.’Choose between our job and your life,’ they told him. He left journalism and Johannesburg.

The official death toll for that Wednesday was 23. Those who were there have told me the real number was several hundred. In 1980, the government-appointed Cillié Commission of Inquiry into the Riots and Soweto and Elsewhere found that ‘eleven people had been killed in the rioting’ on June 16, with a further two people dying afterwards dying from their injuries. Yet, an appendix to that same report lists nine people as having been killed by police – the youngest just 11 years old – with four succumbing to their wounds later.

Chapter 6: Victory in our Lifetime: Marriage

“‘What else should we have done?’ he responds, his voice calm and even. ‘We weren’t burying our heads in the sand. We were saying we’ve got this good thing going on, and even if we don’t know where it's going to take us, let us commit. Because love is about committing.’ I guess no one ever really knows how a marriage will unfold. You just take a chance. You bet on your love.

I have spent many years judging my dad’s performance as a father. I have spent much less time considering what it took for him to keep going, and to give me what he did. He knows I’m writing about him, and about the things that went wrong and the places where we both fell short. Opening up in the way that he has a radical act of generosity.

Chapter 7: Out of Fire, New Life: 1977

“The world around my mother as I grew in her womb was one of violence and repression. Yet she and my family had created another reality, filled with tenderness and care. That I had made it into the world was a testimony to their efforts. Snowy returned me to my mother’s arms, my head having been gently kneaded from a conical shape back to round once more. As I lay there, my mum marvelled at the embodiment of a love so hard fought for.

Chapter 8: What Apartheid Could Not Penetrate: Family

When his father – my great-grandfather – died in 1954, the family found notebooks neatly kept in a drawer of a desk in the dining room. They were filled with minutes from local ANC meetings written in his beautiful calligraphic script. Years later, my dad and his siblings burned the notebooks, fearful that they could be found by the police. They foresaw that raids would become a constant part of their lives, continuing even after my dad fled the country.

Chapter 9: Leave no Mark: Escape

“The story my parents want to tell is different from the one I want to write.

My dad wants to recount the political history of South Africa and the Movement. He wants to tell me about the comrade-uncles in Lusaka and London who I knew as a toddler and young child, explaining how they – and he – fitted into the broader trajectory of the ANC. My mum wants to tell the story of the people who shaped her activism, like Joe Gqabi, who guided her as she told him about the discontent at Phefeni, and her friend Baba who turned up with his Beetle on June 16. The story she wants to tell is one of shared effort and history.

The story I want to tell is of my gentle yet courageous dad, and how the path he chose cost him dearly. It is the story of my beautiful mum, barely in her 20s, with bravery I cannot imagine ever possessing. It is of both of them in love, idealistic and determined. It is of my feisty, fearless and fun-loving aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, the quiet revolutionaries.

My mum says it’s not done to talk about one’s own contribution. Rakgadi agrees, saying it’s not our culture. She does not mean Tswana or Xhosa culture. She means the culture of the Movement.The Struggle was a collective endeavour, above any individual. It seems ugly, grasping and glory hunting in the face of other people’s suffering to oneself front and centre. Freedom fighters were trained in secrecy. They took pride in it. Even couples instinctively knew what not to ask each other.

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.

To say that we were missed in Soweto feels like an inadequate and flimsy way of describing the rupturing of hearts and scarring of the souls of those who loved us. For the family in Diepkloof, it followed a series of deep losses, first my great-grandfather, then my great-grandmother, then my mother and me. In Orlando East, the family put on a brave face. Life went on because it had to. They tried to place their grief behind a locked door, but it was still there. We were alive, so my uncles and aunts told themselves they were not grieving. But what else do you call the loss of a child who is the flesh of your flesh, and a sister-in-law who had become like blood? Rakgadi says it is the alternative that would have crushed her; her brother or sister-in-law imprisoned or worse, and me robbed of my parents.

PART TWO: Chapter 10: The Wilderness Years: Exile

“Nevertheless, the feeling that my parents had a greater mission that took priority over me became the dominant narrative in my mind, pushing out the many ways in which my mum and dad tried to be present and available. I edited out so many of the ways in which they showed up for me and loved me, my own bias shaping the story I told myself for years.

Writing this book has required me to both collect and re-examine all of the evidence at my disposal, not just that which is most easily accessible in my head. The realisation that I had erased so much of their efforts is hard to sit with.

Chapter 11: The Power of the Tongue: Language

“I have learned to sense which me linguistically a situation demands, and with whom it is safe to sound like myself. Today we call this code-switching, but when I was younger there was no name for the delicate dance so many Black people do. The one where we bend and twist our tongues in order for white people at our places of work or education to see us as smart or respectable enough to be there, and then adjust once we’re with friends or family, in order to show we are not lost to that white world. It is a dance that even revolutionaries feel they must partake in.

Lebo, you’re really more British than African.’ It was an observation rather than a criticism, but it landed in my ears and my heart as a questioning of my identity and my efforts. I detected, or perhaps projected, something else too: the belief that exiles had things easier because they had chosen to leave. It may be that there are people who have navigated this more deftly than I did, without all the pain and anxiety. I wish that had been my experience too.

Chapter 12: Changing Tides: A Girl at Dea

“For days my mother’s fragrance lingered on the landing that ran between my parents room and mine. There were no windows there, just a bulb overhead, but it is the one part of the house where I remember there being light.

In his pain, my dad couldn't find the softness that would have helped me to adjust to our new reality.

But from where I stood, it didn’t seem that my dad really enjoyed having me around. Like most children, I assumed the behaviour of the adults in my life was motivated by how they felt about me, rather than their own despair or distress. I know now that the pain of the breakdown of the family he had made sat on top of the wound of being torn from the family of his birth. And to that the brutal aloneness of exile, and it all felt unbearable.

Chapter 13: Homecoming: The Return

“It is hard to explain what it is like to go from feeling different from everyone around you to feeling so connected to everyone in your world. In England, my parents and I had been alone, like limbs detached from their body. In South Africa, I caught glimpses of myself in the way my aunts and cousins laughed or moved their hands, as if I was looking into little mirrors on a beautiful embroidered cloth. But it was with Fumane that I saw my fullest reflection. I don't mean in the physical sense, although we have the same cheekbones and generous lips. It was in the way I could feel her emotions by just looking into her eyes, like we were made from the same material, the same cloth. We were cut to slightly different patterns, but the fabric of us responded the same way to heat, light, movement and life. I had never met anyone like that before.

Chapter 15: The Prodigal Daughter: New Beginnings

“I was, however, driven by more than a love for journalism. There was still that voice inside of me saying that I had to prove I was enough. My relationship with both my parents was still strained, but I told myself that if I could reach my goals it wouldn't matter anymore. I just needed to push harder, work smarter, and I would be a lead presenter by the time I was 30, buy a house, find love and have a family.