With its imposing columned facade, hunting trophies and oil portraits, the Rand Club in Johannesburg’s city centre is a relic of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past. Founded in 1887 by British mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, it was the favoured venue for white businessmen and free-wheeling gold prospectors to strike deals and socialise in the hushed library or at the 31-metre-long (102-feet) teak bar, reputedly the longest in Africa.

But Alicia Thompson, a black woman born in Johannesburg, is seeking to reposition the club, which has struggled to stay open in recent years, by attracting the city’s “young hustlers” of today while preserving its heritage. Thompson, a 46-year-old beauty business owner who is the club’s deputy chairman, said that she had faced “not one iota of resistance” in her efforts to haul the club into the modern era.

“I grew up in Johannesburg, I frequented the city and I used to see this building that I was not allowed to enter,” said Thompson. “It was this hallowed, ivory tower and I didn’t know what happened inside. Then I attended a wedding here in 2010, and I couldn’t believe that this gem was withheld from us for all our life.”

Thompson has seen the number of full-time members — paying $720 (R10 052,86) a year — grow recently to nearly 500 after years of decline, while the numbers of student and absentee members are also up.

“My attitude to members is just to make it your space,” she said. A life-sized portrait of Rhodes, an imperialist businessman and politician inextricably linked with racism and colonial exploitation, still hangs in a second-floor room. But the room itself, which previously bore his name, has been renamed the Founders’ Room following an initiative by younger members.

Books from another era bearing the words “kaffir” (an offensive racial slur) and “native” still line the shelves of the library, alongside a fireplace, wingback leather armchairs and a typewriter.

“Some of our history is very unimpressive — but I’m not a ‘fallist’,” said member Lucky Dinake, 24, a black councillor from the main opposition Democratic Alliance party. “Fallist” refers to supporters of the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement sparked in South Africa in 2015 by students seeking the removal of statues of Rhodes and other colonial symbols from university campuses.

“Our history is our history. Our responsibility is to learn from it, move forward, not to tear it down,” Dinake told AFP.