South Africa Guide
KwaZulu-Natal
The Kwa Muhle Museum
Address: 130 Ordnance Rd, northern perimeter of Central Park
Opening time: Mon– Sat 8.30am–4pm, Sun 11am–4.30pm
Price: Free
The Kwa MuhleMuseum – also known as the Apartheid Museum – should not be missed if you have the slightest interest in understanding modern South Africa. Permanent exhibitions include one on the Durban System, which enabled the city council to finance the administration of African affairs without ever spending a penny of white ratepayers' money. It achieved this by granting itself a monopoly on the brewing of sorghum beer, which it sold through vast, African-only municipal beer halls. The resulting revenue was used to ensure that blacks lived in an "orderly" way. The exhibit also illustrates the Pass System, one of the most hated aspects of apartheid, through which constant tabs could be kept on Africans and their influx into the urban areas. Look out, too, for photographs of life in the single-sex, artificially tribalized worker hostels, which deliberately sowed divisions among blacks by creating separations and divisions, and so played its part in much of the current violence in South Africa.