Sol: My Friend and Adversary, Sol Kerzner by Peter Venison (J DoubleD Publicity, 2025)
Sometimes it’s better to take no action than to take the wrong action. Peter Venison should have rather used his retirement to improve his golf handicap or something. At the beginning of this biography, he confirms that the only reason he put pen to paper was that he had been searching for a Sol Kerzner biography at an Exclusive Books store and hadn’t found any.
Being the man of action that he portrays himself to be, Venison took on the task of waxing lyrical about one of South Africa’s greatest sons. Sol Kerzner! The Sol Kerzner! Remember him? If you’re a 1980s baby like me and whenever you asked your parents for soccer boots and they said, “I just paid for your school fees, I don’t have money for soccer boots … I can’t buy everything, I am not Sol Kerzner!”
Yes, that guy.
Venison thought we needed to immortalise him with a half-cooked book that features half the writer’s family emigrations and important promotions.
It was a gonzo journalism-inspired idea. Put the writer at the centre of the story, push the subject to the edges and Hunter S Thompson has competition.
The book is not entirely crap. It’s just that if I had 20 years of working with a man whose name is synonymous with success, I’d like to think I would produce a book far more detailed than what a long-form magazine would have done.
For example, Venison says he worked at the Lost Palace construction site circa 1975. Yet he has limited details of what transpired during construction, bar the fact that it was built at record speed. Yeah, am sure it was. We could have pulled a newspaper clipping to confirm that.
But I am being unfair. Venison did tell a story no writer has managed to publish. The previous one who tried to was stopped by the courts after Kerzner got an interdict, literally the night before publication.
There are exciting parts to the book, Kerzner’s adult-rated rants to his staff being my favourite. He was not your typical Jewish boy. He swore. A lot. He drank like a fish and loved his ladies (according to the book he was married three times, but others say four times).
But Sol was also super smart and had made accounting partner at a firm in Johannesburg by 29.
His story is one of perseverance and determination to be rich. Seemingly nothing else. Sol was driven by the wish to live a good life.
He hailed from Troyeville via Durban. Like any township boy narrative, he just wanted to make it so he can ball out. He wasn’t trying to be a professor of anything. He wanted to get cash so he could pay for the private jet and the big houses. He was unmistakable to today’s tenderpreuner. It wasn’t that deep for him. It was all about the Benjys.
The true difference, we’re told, was that he wasn’t willing to take shortcuts to get to his ultimate dream, that of being rich.
He built his empire one hotel — sometimes two — at a time. He bent rules and influenced (and bribed a few apartheid government officials) to get his land approvals. He wasn’t exactly a corporate governance advocate. In fact I think he was just following the corrupt ways of the Calvinist apartheid state. He was no angel and he didn’t pretend that he was one.
Anyway, for Venison to now write a book that gives us newspaper highlights such as the Matanzima bribery incident, without letting us into the inner conversations of that time, is weird. It’s like, what was the use of Matanzima being second-in-command at Sun International if he isn’t going to spill the beans? Sol is long gone … we can’t arrest him now. Tell us the full thing, maan!
Anyway, I enjoyed reading about a prominent South African business person who started a company that has gone to be internationally renowned and employed a shitlot of our people. God knows we need to get our people employed.
Sun International is one of those local companies that punches above their weight, in the same vein as Shoprite, Bidvest, Sibanye-Stillwater, Sasol, Nandos, Aspen… Companies that are South African by birth but now live across the world.
I would encourage anyone who likes the art of building an empire to read this one. For history aficionados, I would suggest you wait for the real biography. I am sure it’s still coming.