Can Sun City shine again?
Sun City, originally the brainchild of Sol Kerzner, was revamped recently at a cost of R1bn and relaunched as a family-friendly place. But in the modern era life is not easy for the famed Pilanesberg resort
Sol Kerzner never doubted that Sun City would work. From the moment he saw the site, in a volcanic crater in the Pilanesberg, from the helicopter he was flying in, he knew it was the right spot. “We flew around and finally we landed,” he says. “The architect was with me and I said we don’t have to look at the other two sites ... the hills, the valleys, I could foresee everything. I said put the lake there, the golf course around the lake. I saw it.” From that day, during the height of apartheid in the mid-1970s, grew a legend that made SA (or technically, the Bophuthatswana homeland, where Sun City was located) globally famous — from its Million Dollar Golf Challenge to top-of-the-range boxing bouts and Miss World pageants. During the 1980s, Sun City was all glitz, glamour and bright lights of a sort you couldn’t find elsewhere in SA. It was a playground for the elite in an era of repressive laws and enforced racial segregation. Back then in SA, gambling was illegal, movies were clo...
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