Durban holds South Africa's finest Zulu material-culture collections, a 1930s Art Deco downtown few visitors ever read, and a live scene running from the Playhouse's six theatres to KwaMashu's rehearsal halls. Three days of galleries, stages and studios.
Founded 1892 and housed on the second floor of the 1910 Edwardian City Hall, it was the first South African gallery to collect black artists' work and holds strong Zulu craft, ceramics and contemporary print holdings.
Between Dr Pixley KaSeme and Anton Lembede streets sits one of the southern hemisphere's densest Art Deco clusters — 1930s ocean-liner curves, ziggurat parapets and terrazzo lobbies built on Durban's interwar port money.
The KwaZulu-Natal Society of Arts runs three exhibition spaces in a 1990s Bay/Cape-modern building, rotating shows every five weeks with a craft shop of local ceramics and a courtyard café under fig trees.
The 1904 neo-Gothic Catholic cathedral sits directly beneath the Warwick flyovers, a collision of Victorian brick spires and 1980s apartheid-era concrete infrastructure that explains the shape of central Durban.
The former Department of Native Affairs building where black Durbanites once queued for passes is now a museum of the 'Durban System' — permits, beer-hall revenue and forced removals, told with original counters intact.
A compact centre documenting the indentured Indian arrivals from 1860 — ship registers, sugar-estate contracts and family photographs that underpin Durban's Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati communities.
Two municipal museums share the City Hall ground floor: a natural science hall with the KwaZulu-Natal dodo reconstruction and insect gallery, plus Local History's colonial-Durban rooms and period shopfronts.
Six venues inside a mock-Tudor 1930s cinema complex, home to the Playhouse Dance Company and KZN Philharmonic seasons — isicathamiya, Zulu-language drama and opera share the same week's programme.
The township arts centre in KwaMashu K-Section that trained much of Durban's theatre generation, running drama, dance and marimba rehearsals you can sit in on when the halls are working.
An artists' collective on the harbour built around a Zulu-hut-shaped hall — studios for beadwork, sculpture and printmaking, a Menzi Mchunu-era music stage and the Democratic Republic of Food kitchen upstairs.
John Langalibalele Dube's 1900 school, where Nelson Mandela cast his 1994 vote beside Dube's grave. The Inanda Heritage Route links it to Gandhi's Phoenix Settlement and Shembe's Ebuhleni.
The old brick warehouses behind the Bat Centre now carry Durban's gig circuit: gqom DJs, jazz quartets and poetry nights within a few blocks of Umgeni Road's converted industrial shells.