295: Lebo Diseko’s The House at 6001
Dear Friends
Last week I said we would visit Lebo Diseko’s memoir The House at 6001, and that is where soul and self will go.
/strategy
Two weeks ago, I wrote to you about loss. I am grateful for your many messages of solidarity. I felt, though, it is important to note this: I wrote it, yes, to process my emotions. I wrote it also because I know that all of us turn up day after day, and from the outside, all others see is achievement, determination, resilience but, frequently, underneath that is loss, anxiety, stress, and fatigue: beneath every smiling enthusiastic act of professionalism (or failure) is a human, dealing with all the stuff of being human, sometimes well and sometimes not so well.
Last week’s letter that explored the current national (and indeed global debate) on immigration and income inequality also triggered rich conversations.
Thank you to chairperson of Hlayisani Capital’s Investment Committee (and other NED roles), Lerato Molefe for sharing this Plato-informed perspective from the NYT, Elon Musk Confirms Ancient Concerns About the Superrich. This should entice you, “Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, ‘a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,’ because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth. As a consequence, Plato wrote, ‘it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.’”
Another reader referred me to a 2022 Health Ombuds Report on the failings at Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital in Johannesburg. It is a microcosm of the broader debate: 41% of the patients admitted were foreign nationals. So, yes, in key parts of our social infrastructure, immigration adds pressure. The current debate, South African and global, stops there. Well, actually it doesn’t, it vilifies poor people who are seeking help.
Back to the Ombud: we discover, alongside this, no Hospital Board had been appointed for 3 years. A CEO was appointed on the basis of a job advertisement described as “incomplete, vague, and non-specific, as if tampered with in some manner”, and when compared to guidelines and equivalent positions in other provinces, the requirements were “woefully deficient.” Said CEO was also absent from their role for substantial periods of unaccounted for time. A 2016 report on degrading infrastructure recommending urgent intervention had not been actioned. And, of course, outside of this we know that several people were using the Gauteng Health System to buy, amongst other luxuries, a R52.2-million Pagani Huayra Roadster (I did not know that such a thing existed, and, thanks to Lerato, we now know what Plato would say).
It is all too easy to blame the outsider, far harder to fix and run a complex system. Remember: this same dynamic happens in our organisations – watch out for it, it only ever leads to partial, sometimes destructive, solutions.
//soul & self
Diseko’s book is rooted in the particulars of the South African story: apartheid’s repressive machinery, the brutal tragedy of Soweto ’76 and the pain of exile. And uses them to reflect universal themes: where is home when home isn’t home; how repression always seeds its own demise; about the slow discoveries that come from compassion to oneself and others.
Her father was on the apartheid state’s watchlist. His poetry deemed dangerous.
She observes, “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”.
She reminded me of Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, in which a poet’s work is claimed by and becomes a calling card for activists, but it is the state’s repressive response that transforms her into one (Read more here).
Diseko reminds us of apartheid brutality, how it scarred the most intimate places: Her grandfather arbitrarily arrested and then beaten, while her father, a child, waited at the police station. She writes, “He and my dad walked home in silence. They never spoke about it, or the myriad other daily degradations they experienced. They buried the pain and kept going”.
When her great-grandfather died in 1954, the family found notebooks filled with his minutes of ANC meetings. They burnt them in fear that they’d be discovered.
In the aftermath of 1976, Diseko’s parents, like thousands of others, were forced into exile (The Continent News’ photo essay captures beautifully how the continent became home for South Africa’s activists). They took her with. Another break. Exile meant no grandparents, no daily Tswana or Xhosa, no extended family. Memories gone before they could be formed.
“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…”
It meant for her a permanent liminal zone, the ability to chameleon into many places, but no place of easy peace. In this, The House at 6001 is a sibling to Nadia Owusu’s beautiful Aftershocks (Read more here).
Diseko’s courageous exploration of the stories she told herself to make sense of her world is a gift to all who are trying to understand how they became who they are.
She reflects, “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” and “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.”
She reminds us that compassionate curiosity gives us the chance to adjust how we understand and script our lives, and as we do so, as we enrich and complicate our story, we create more space in which we and others can evolve. She doesn’t give us a neat ending. She gives us an unfolding journey and that is a truthful gift, for that is life.
Yours
Karl
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