When journalist Lebo Diseko — born a year after the June 16 Soweto revolt — set out to write a book exploring the impact of that history on her family, she did not expect to encounter deep trauma, become immersed in powerful family bonds, or begin a renewed process of healing.
In The House at 6001, her memoir of the day that became the start of the Soweto uprising, Diseko recounts how that watershed moment reverberated through her family home in Orlando East. She traces the intertwined lives of her parents, aunts and uncles who gathered, organised and resisted within the walls of their house.
Speaking to the Sunday Times from London, where she is based, Diseko said she had not deliberately set out to tell the June 16 story. Instead, the memoir emerged during a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2023, when she enrolled in a narrative nonfiction writing class.
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