Chronicle No. 56 · People

Sol Kerzner: The Chartered Accountant Who Built Palaces in the Bush

The son of Russian immigrants who ran small kosher hotels in Durban went on to invent the African destination resort.

Sol Kerzner was born in Durban on 23 August 1935, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who owned and ran a small chain of kosher hotels. He grew up in the trade, in the least glamorous corner of it.

He did not go straight into hotels. He read commerce at the University of the Witwatersrand, qualified as a chartered accountant, boxed as varsity welterweight champion and played with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra.

Then he went back to the family business and rebuilt it at a scale nobody in South Africa had attempted.

• In 1964 he opened the Beverly Hills Hotel at Umhlanga, described as South Africa's first five-star hotel
• In 1969 he founded Southern Sun Hotels in partnership with South African Breweries
• In 1975 he opened his first hotel outside South Africa, Le Saint Geran in Mauritius
• In 1979 he opened Sun City, a resort complex in the bushveld two hours from Johannesburg
• In 1994 he arranged the VIP function for Nelson Mandela's inauguration
• In 2002 he launched the One&Only resort brand

Sun City was the pivot. Kerzner's insight was that a destination does not need a city, a coastline or a monument - it needs a reason. He manufactured one, complete with its own invented mythology, and people flew in.

He was appointed an honorary KCMG and given the International Hotel Investment Forum's lifetime achievement award in 2019. He died in Cape Town on 21 March 2020.

Kerzner's career is the strongest argument in hospitality for the value of a numerate operator with an unreasonable imagination. Either half alone would have built nothing.

Lesson: Guests will travel a very long way for something they cannot see anywhere else - the hard part is having the nerve to build it.