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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.