South End was a mixed-race neighbourhood that had grown up over more than a century at the southern edge of the city centre — Malay, Indian, Coloured, and a few white families living side by side in a dense urban quarter of terraced houses, mosques, temples, a synagogue, churches, and corner shops. Under the Group Areas Act, the apartheid government declared it a whites-only area in the early 1960s. By 1975 it had been almost entirely demolished. Some 6,000 families were forcibly relocated to townships on the city's periphery. A freeway and a conference centre were built in their place.
The museum occupies one of the last buildings left standing in South End — a former school at the edge of what is now an empty, windswept plateau where the neighbourhood used to be. It tells the story of the community through photographs, personal objects, oral histories, and reconstructed rooms. The approach is specific and intimate rather than abstract: you learn about particular families, particular streets, particular lives interrupted. It is one of the most honest and most quietly devastating museums about apartheid's domestic violence anywhere in South Africa. Allow two hours. It is not a comfortable experience, but it is an important one.