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FTER a few hours at the Apartheid Museum you will feel that you were in the townships in the 70s and 80s, dodging police bullets or teargas canisters, or marching and toy-toying with thousands of school children, or carrying the body of a comrade into a nearby house.

This extraordinarily powerful museum has already become the city's leading tourist attraction, an obligatory stop for visitors and residents alike. The Museum, with its large blown-up photographs, metal cages and numerous monitors recording continuous replays of apartheid scenes set in a double volume ceiling, concrete and red brick walls and grey concrete floor, is next to the Gold Reef City Casino, five kilometres south of the city centre.

The Museum's director, Christopher Till, says: "It is appropriate that the first Apartheid Museum in South Africa should open in Johannesburg, where at the turn of the century there was a convergence of people for a range of different reasons.

"Black people were displaced from the land through colonial wars and the imposition of poll taxes, and white farmers were displaced through the Anglo Boer War," says Till.

The Museum came about as part of a casino bid seven years ago. Bidders were obliged to indicate what social responsibility commitment they were prepared to get involved in, and the casino indicated that they would build a museum. "R80-million was committed to the building of the Museum by the casino consortium. The consortium is committed to the running costs of the Museum for a further two years, by which time they would have spent around R100-million on the project," says Till.

The Museum occupies approximately 6 000 square metres on a seven-hectare site which consists of natural recreated veld and indigenous bush habitat containing a lake and paths, alongside its stark but stunning building. "The synergy between the natural element and the building finish of plaster, concrete, red brick, rusted and galvanised steel, creates a harmonious relationship between the structure and the environment," says chairman of the Museum board, John Kani.

A multi-discipliniary team of curators, filmmakers, historians, museologists and designers was assembled to develop the exhibition narrative which sets out by means of large blown-up photographs, artefacts, newspaper clippings, and some extraordinary film footage, to graphically animate the apartheid story.

Tickets for the Museum are plastic credit-card size cards indicating either "Non-white" or "White" and with one in your hand, you know you have begun a harrowing journey. As you swing through the turnstile on your historical journey from the early peoples of South Africa to the birth of democracy in the country, tall cages greet you, and inside the cages are blown-up copies of the racially-tagged identity cards, identity books and the hated pass books.

The rest of the Museum is just as graphic:

• a large yellow and blue casspir in which you can sit and watch footage taken from inside the vehicle driving through the townships;
• dangling from the roof, 121 nooses representing the political prisoners hanged during apartheid;
• a 16 June, 1976 room with a curved wall of monitors projecting horrific images of the day from around the world.
• a cage full of dreadful weapons that were used by the security forces to enforce apartheid.
• footage of a remarkable 1961 BBC interview with Nelson Mandela when he was in hiding from the authorities; footage of prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd addressing a crowd in English, explaining how the country can be happily ruled only when the races are separated;

At times you feel overwhelmed by the screens and the sound and the powerful images they are projecting. The Museum leads you through room after room in a zigzag of shapes, some with tall roofs, some dark and gloomy, some looking through to other images behind bars or cages that make it clear that apartheid was not only immoral, but evil.

And just when you feel you can't tolerate the bombardment of your senses any longer, you reach a quiet space, with a glass case which contains a book of the new Constitution of South Africa, and pebbles on the floor. You can express your solidarity with the victims of apartheid by placing your own pebble on a pile, and take a book. You'll then walk out into a grassland with paths which take you to a small lake - you'll need this reflective time.

The multimedia displays are not static - visitors can interact by adding their contributions. There are blown-up monolith figures in transparent cases of the descendants of the first people who came to the Witwatersrand, with their artefacts in cabinets on the wall beside them - you can leave your historical artefacts and have your photograph put in one of these cases. There is a recording studio in which you can leave your experiences under apartheid for others to hear.

"It is not only important to tell the apartheid story, but it is also important to show the world how we have overcome apartheid. There certainly is a lesson to teach other countries and this will be done through the complexity and sheer power of the installations," explains Till.

The displays in the Museum are ongoing and incomplete - the history of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is still to be displayed; the personal stories will continually be included; the role of Helen Suzman in South Africa's history is to be expanded.

"The overriding message is to show local and international visitors the perilous results of racial prejudice and how this in the case of South Africa, nearly destroyed the country and in so doing destroyed people's lives and caused enormous suffering," says Kani.

An architectural consortium consisting of five leading architectural teams was assembled to design the Museum. "The building is a triumph of design, space and landscape fused into creating a building of international significance," says Kani.

Till agrees. "The building itself has power, which is what is needed to put across the powerful message the Museum has to offer. It is the most important public building to be built in the last 20 years."

Till says the response so far to the Museum has been "enormously encouraging. One of the people involved in the Holocaust Museum in Washington has seen our Museum, and responded by saying we have achieved something special here".