Artists United Against Apartheid - Sun City

Sun City

Van Zandt, who had parted with Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band at the height of their success to go out on his own, traveled to South Africa to research his next record. He was interested in South Africa because he had read that the apartheid system was actually modeled after America's system of Indian reservations, an issue that was his major passion. While in South Africa, he was distressed by a place called Sun City, an interracial gambling resort located in a bantustan, a nominally independent area supposedly ruled by black Africans, in the middle of an impoverished rural homeland.