Sol Kerzner, a sharp-elbowed tycoon and developer of luxurious hotels, casinos and resorts, who used the splintered geography of ethnic division in his native South Africa to profit hugely by circumventing the social and sexual strictures of apartheid, died on March 20 at his home in Cape Town. He was 84.

The cause was cancer, his family said in a statement.

Mr. Kerzner’s story was often depicted as a poor-boy-makes-good one, from beginnings in a blue-collar neighborhood of Johannesburg to membership in an international cabal of tycoons and celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli. His empire stretched from the United States to China by way of the Bahamas, Morocco, Mauritius, Dubai and elsewhere. In the 1990s he was labeled a South African version of Donald J. Trump.

For all his international profile, though, his name was most closely associated with Sun City, a gaudy hotel, casino and golf complex with a 6,000-seat arena, situated about 90 miles from Johannesburg. Starting in 1975, Mr. Kerzner oversaw its creation, hewn from raw bushlands and rising in a jumble of architectural whimsy in what was then the nominally independent homeland of Bophuthatswana.

The so-called homelands — known derisively as bantustans — formed a pillar of apartheid, created to strip black South Africans of citizenship and assign to them a nationality based on the ethnicity of their notional new states. Bophuthatswana was intended for people of Tswana descent.