The Sun King Cashes in his Chips

The Sun King Cashes in his Chips

Sol Kerzner, founder of the Southern Sun hotel group, Sun International and Kerzner International, has died of cancer at the age of 84.

KERZNER WAS a titan of the hotel and casino industry who redefined the scale and scope of integrated destination resorts worldwide. The son of Russian immigrants, Kerzner was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1935. The youngest of four and the only son, he was a working class boy from a rough neighbourhood but he would grow up to become one of the most influential entrepreneurs in South Africa. Having founded the country’s two largest hotel groups - Southern Sun and Sun International - Kerzner would go on to achieve international prominence with groundbreaking resorts that helped transform the tourism industries not only of his home country but of Mauritius, the Maldives, the Bahamas, Dubai and other important international destinations.

Kerzner set up the first casino across the border from South Africa in the former Bophutatswana, when gambling was still illegal in neighbouring South Africa. Sun City became famous world-wide as a result of his pioneering vision of bringing Vegas-style resort casinos to Africa, and South Africans flocked in droves across the border to sample this never-beforeseen style of gambling and entertainment.

Known to those who worked with him in the early days as a tireless, yet irascible perfectionist, he laid the groundwork for what would eventually become South Africa’s burgeoning casino industry. Sol’s glamorous lifestyle in the early days as celebrities, musicians and beauty queens flocked to Sun City made him famous and firmly entrenched his celebrity status, earning him the tabloid-moniker the ‘Sun King’