Sun City, South Africa’s Golden City: from

Sun City, South Africa’s Golden City:

Sun City or Sin City?

Home to four luxurious hotels, two Gary Player-designed golf courses and an artifi cial surfi ng beach, Sun

City is South Africa’s (wilder) answer to

Disney World. But those faux gold fi nishes are built on a crooked foundation. In the late 1970s, hotelier Sol Kerzner took advantage of apartheid-era rules to establish casinos in several supposedly independent Black homelands such as Bophuthatswana (gambling was outlawed in white South Africa at the time).

Once built, Kerzner paid eye-watering sums to international musicians (Frank Sinatra, Queen, The Beach Boys) to bust the international sanctions imposed on apartheid South Africa and visit Sun City. Gary Player, meanwhile, attracted a stellar fi eld to what was then the world’s richest golf tournament. When apartheid ended, Kerzner used “a working relationship” with Nelson Mandela to ensure the sun never set on Sun City (Gambling in the

Bophuthatswana Sun: Sun City and the political economy of a Bantustan casino:1965-1994

Van der Merwe, Nicola Sarah.

Image credits: bushbaby.travel, southafrica.to, sudafricasafaris. com, jets.com

from a Shady Past to a Shiny Present