Sun City

The land around the Pilanesberg belongs to the Bakubung, a Tswana community whose villages lie beside what is now the resort, and the hills themselves are the eroded root of a volcano that erupted more than a billion years ago. In the apartheid era this area was assigned to Bophuthatswana, a homeland made up of scattered blocks of territory which was declared nominally independent in 1977 and recognised by no state other than South Africa and Transkei, another homeland.

That status was the reason Sun City exists. Gambling and other entertainment then restricted in South Africa were permitted in the homelands, and the hotel operator Sol Kerzner opened a casino resort on Bakubung land in December 1979, reachable in a couple of hours from Johannesburg. It became a byword for weekends away, boxing matches, beauty pageants and concerts at its arena, and international performers who appeared there were criticised during the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa, with a protest record in 1985 making the resort's name a slogan of the anti-apartheid campaign.

The complex expanded through the 1980s and again in the early 1990s, when the Lost City was built: a themed extension with an invented legend, a palace hotel, a rainforest of imported and planted trees, an artificial wave pool and a second golf course. Bophuthatswana collapsed in March 1994 and the area became part of the new North West province, ending the gambling monopoly that had underpinned the business as casinos opened across the country. Sun City has since repositioned itself as a family and conference resort trading on its water park, its golf and the neighbouring national park, and has been repeatedly refurbished.

Sun City is a manufactured place, and its style is deliberate: carved elephants and leopards, mock ruins, domes and bridges, piped birdsong, and an imagined African civilisation invented for the Lost City extension. Visitors treat it as spectacle rather than heritage, and the contrast with the real Tswana villages and Iron Age sites nearby is part of what makes it a much-discussed place in South Africa.

Its cultural weight in the country comes from entertainment and sport. The arena has staged world title boxing, beauty pageants and long-running concert seasons, and the year-end golf tournament on the championship course is a fixture of the sporting calendar that fills the resort. For a generation of South Africans a trip here — the wave pool, the slides, the arcade — is a shared childhood memory, which keeps it busy in school holidays.

The politics are unavoidable. The resort was created because the homeland system allowed activities banned elsewhere, it drew international protest during the boycott years, and it was built on land belonging to a community whose members provide much of the workforce. Those facts sit alongside its present role as an employer and a large contributor to the North West's tourism economy. Manners inside are relaxed and international: casual dress, English as the working language, tipping expected, and a steady rhythm of buffet breakfasts, pool afternoons and evening entertainment.

Sun City has no permanent population of its own in the way a town does; its residents are guests, and the people who make it work live in the Bakubung villages at Ledig outside the gates, in Mogwase and in Rustenburg, arriving by staff bus and minibus taxi for shifts that run around the clock. Thousands of jobs depend on the complex — kitchens, housekeeping, gardens, gaming, security, maintenance, guiding — making it one of the largest employers in the district.

The working day follows the guests: breakfast services from early morning, the water park and pools through the middle of the day, golf at both ends of it, and the casino and restaurants late. Occupancy swings hard with school holidays, long weekends, conferences and the year-end tournament, so staffing is seasonal and overtime common.

Outside the fence, life is that of the rural North West: subsistence and small plots, platinum mining a short drive away around Rustenburg, high unemployment, and households in which resort wages support extended families. Water supply, electricity interruptions and road conditions are the recurring local concerns, and the relationship between the resort, the Bakubung authorities and the provincial parks board — over land, jobs and the boundary with the national park — is a continuing local issue.

Eating at Sun City is resort eating: buffets, grills, pizzas, sushi, burgers and coffee shops spread through the entertainment centre and the hotels, aimed at families and conference groups rather than at local tradition. The braai, the open-fire grill that is the national way of cooking meat, appears in a formal version at the steakhouses and in outdoor settings, with boerewors, the coiled spiced sausage, sosaties, marinated kebabs, and beef and lamb over coals.

The North West's own cooking shows more clearly outside the gates. Pap, the stiff maize porridge, is eaten with a meat stew or with chakalaka, a spiced vegetable relish; seswaa, beef or goat boiled until it falls apart and then pounded, is the Tswana dish for celebrations; and ting, a sour fermented sorghum or maize porridge, is a household staple. Butcheries sell meat to be grilled on the spot, which is the local equivalent of a restaurant meal.

Snacks and drinks are straightforward. Vetkoek, fried dough eaten with mince or jam, and grilled maize cobs are sold at the roadside; biltong and droëwors, the air-dried spiced meats, are the standard travelling food; and the fruit spirit known as mampoer, distilled from peaches or marulas, is made on farms to the west. Wine comes from the Cape, beer is the default drink, and rooibos, the red bush tea, is served everywhere.