Xuma was a figure of firsts. Born in 1893 in the Eastern Cape, he became one of the first Black South Africans to qualify as a medical doctor, training in the United States and Europe before returning home to practise. From 1940 to 1949 he served as president-general of the African National Congress, rebuilding a struggling organisation and laying groundwork that a younger generation would inherit. He shared Empilweni with his second wife, Madie Hall Xuma, an American educator who became the first president of the ANC Women's League. Xuma designed his home to do double duty: an L-shaped plan let one wing serve as his residence while the other held his consulting rooms, facing Edward Road, so that the community could reach a doctor when few other Black neighbourhoods could. The interior matched the man's standing, with pressed-steel ceilings, klompie-brick fireplaces, and polished timber floors and picture rails, a quietly dignified home for a leader who moved easily between a surgery, a clinic, and the negotiating tables of national politics.

Sophiatown was to Johannesburg what District Six was to Cape Town: crowded, poor, musical, and fiercely alive. It produced writers, jazz musicians, and a culture that refused to be small. It was also, to the architects of apartheid, an intolerable thing, a place where Black residents held freehold title in a city meant to be carved by colour. Under the Natives Resettlement Act of 1954, the government declared the area a white zone and began forced removals. Around 65,000 people were torn from their homes in the mid-1950s, loaded onto trucks, and resettled in Meadowlands and Soweto. The houses were demolished behind them. The state renamed what it built on the rubble Triomf, the Afrikaans word for triumph.

Xuma held out longer than most. By the late 1950s, after nearly everyone else had been moved, he too was forced from the home he had lived in for almost a quarter of a century. But the house itself survived the demolitions, one of only two structures in all of Sophiatown to outlast the removals of its Black owners and tenants. It stood through the decades of Triomf, an Afrikaner suburb built over a buried neighbourhood, an inconvenient witness to what had been erased. As the home of a man who reorganised the ANC and helped coordinate the early opposition to racial discrimination, it is a milestone of the liberation struggle hiding in plain sight on a quiet residential street.

In 2006 the authorities restored the neighbourhood's original name, and Sophiatown, on paper at least, was reborn. Xuma's house remained a private residence until 2008, when it opened to the public as the Sophiatown Heritage and Cultural Centre. Declared a national monument in 1998 and a heritage site in 1999, it now serves a purpose its builder might have appreciated: a place where the story of a vanished community is kept alive for those who never saw it. The pressed-steel ceilings, the klompie-brick fireplaces, the polished timber floors all remain. Empilweni still stands, still the place of life, holding the memory of everything around it that did not.