Sol Kerzner built South Africa’s first five-star hotel in 1964. Fifteen years later he started Sun City.
From his family’s hotels in Durban, Sol Kerzner built the Southern Sun group, Sun International and Sun City, then took the model to Mauritius and Connecticut.
Sol Kerzner was born in Durban in 1935 to Russian Jewish immigrants. His family owned and operated a chain of kosher hotels. He played with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, became a university welterweight boxing champion, and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in accounting before qualifying as a chartered accountant and taking control of the family company.
The building years
In December 1964 he built South Africa’s first five-star hotel, the Beverly Hills Hotel in Umhlanga, north of Durban. He followed it with the 450-room Elangeni Hotel on Durban’s beachfront, and in 1969, in partnership with South African Breweries, started the Southern Sun Hotels chain, which by 1983 operated 30 luxury hotels with more than 7,000 rooms. In 1975 he opened his first hotel outside South Africa, Le Saint Géran in Mauritius.
Sun City
In 1979 he began Sun City, described as the most ambitious resort project in Africa. Over ten years he built four hotels, a man-made lake, two championship golf courses designed by Gary Player and an indoor 6,000-seat arena that hosted stars including Frank Sinatra and Queen. In 1994 President Nelson Mandela asked him to arrange the VIP function at his inauguration. In 1996 he opened Mohegan Sun in Connecticut.
Kerzner died in 2020. His career shows how a founder can take a family business and, step by step, build a category.
