Pan Macmillan South Africa is proud to announce the publication of The House at 6001: A Memoir of Uprising and Exile by BBC journalist and 2024 Harvard Nieman Fellow, Lebo Diseko.
Andrea Nattrass, Publisher at Pan Macmillan South Africa said, 'As we look towards the 50th anniversary of the June 16th 1976 uprisings, Pan Macmillan is proud to publish Lebo Diseko's memoir, which powerfully blends the personal and the political to provide new insights into the people and events that forever altered the trajectory of South Africa.'
Lebo Diseko, a respected broadcaster focusing on international news, turns her investigative lens inward to uncover her family’s hidden history.
Born into a hub of political activism in Orlando East, Lebo spent her childhood in exile in England, unaware of her father's treason charges or her mother's covert operations. The memoir vividly reconstructs the lives of her parents, Joyce and Mathe, who balanced their roles as young revolutionaries with falling in love and surviving immense state repression.
On 16 June 1976, thousands of Black South African school children marched to protest the introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Met with brutal police force, the day descended into deadly violence. Diseko's family was intimately involved on the front lines: her nineteen-year-old mother, Joyce, covertly helped coordinate the student protests, while her aunt Gaahele treated bullet-wounded children at Baragwanath Hospital. As the state ruthlessly hunted student leaders, Lebo's father, Mathe, evaded capture for leading a sabotage cell and was smuggled across the border into Botswana, beginning the family's long and fraught life as stateless refugees.
Drawing on unsealed government documents, historical research, and deeply emotional interviews, Diseko documents the generational impact of trauma, the complexity of linguistic identity, and the extraordinary bravery of her elders.
"As I listened to my elders talking, it struck me that in the midst of such brutal repression, marriages were made, family bonds were formed, and babies were born," says Diseko. "Joy was a form of resistance. Up and down South Africa there were versions of the same experiences – ordinary people who did the extraordinary."
'The House at 6001: A Memoir of Uprising and Exile' is published by Pan Macmillan South Africa