---
title: "Queen booked 12 shows at South Africa’s Sun City in 1984, defying the UN boycott of apartheid"
url: https://badiyaa.com/queen-sun-city-1984-apartheid-boycott/
published: 2026-11-09T12:29:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-09T12:29:00+00:00
section: History
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Queen booked 12 shows at South Africa’s Sun City in 1984, defying the UN boycott of apartheid

Nine months before Live Aid, the band played a resort in an unrecognized Bantustan. The ANC had called for a boycott in 1958, and UN official Enuga Reddy called such shows a serious affront.

Queen booked 12 nights at Sun City in October 1984, inside a homeland that no government outside apartheid’s own system recognized. Nine months later, the same band walked onto the stage at Live Aid.

The October run is the part the Live Aid legend tends to skip. [The tour record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Works_Tour) lists nine nights actually played between October 5 and October 20, with October 9 canceled after Freddie Mercury’s voice gave out. Twelve was the booking, not the final count.

## Why Sun City mattered

[Sun City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_City,_North_West) opened in December 1979 on the land of Bakubung Village, about 90 miles northwest of Johannesburg. It sat in [Bophuthatswana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bophuthatswana), a Bantustan that Pretoria had spun off as a separate state in 1977 and that the UN General Assembly called “totally invalid.” The fiction was useful: gambling banned in South Africa was legal a short drive from its cities.

Enuga S. Reddy, director of the UN Centre Against Apartheid, laid out the mechanism at a press briefing in 1984. Sun City, he said, enticed artists “by paying enormous fees,” and he questioned how ticket sales could cover them. Playing a Bantustan, he said, was “a particularly serious affront to the black people and their liberation movement.”

## A boycott Black South Africans asked for

The boycott did not begin in New York. The African National Congress raised the call for an academic and cultural boycott at the All African People’s Conference in Accra in December 1958. Britain’s Musicians’ Union followed in 1961, and the UN General Assembly passed a dedicated resolution in December 1980.

Reddy credited the pressure at home directly. The UN’s list of performers, he said, answered “appeals by black organizations in South Africa which courageously and effectively demonstrated against several foreign entertainers who defied the boycott.” On October 19, 1981, the Azanian People’s Organisation asked Ray Charles to call off a concert out of respect for a Black Consciousness commemoration. He refused.

The money told its own story. Around 1980, concert tickets ran about $10, while most Black families lived on less than $152 a month, the official poverty level. Put in plain arithmetic, four seats at that price came to $40, or 26 percent of a month’s income at the poverty line. Reddy’s description of the promised integration was blunt: “a few blacks are brought into Sun City, even without tickets as they are beyond the means of the blacks.”

Reddy also rejected the word critics kept using. “The United Nations has no ‘blacklist,'” he said; the registers were “not lists for persecution, but essentially lists for persuasion.” A performer who pledged not to return was removed at once. The first such list had appeared in October 1983, a year before Queen arrived.

## What Queen said, and what followed

The band answered that they would “play to anybody who wants to come and listen” and were “a very non-political group.” They also donated to a school for the deaf and blind. The Musicians’ Union fined them, the British music press attacked them, and their name went on the UN register.

The organizers kept building. Dali Tambo, son of ANC president Oliver Tambo, had started Artists Against Apartheid with British musician Jerry Dammers in 1983. Its 1986 festival on Clapham Common drew 250,000 people, and future South African president Thabo Mbeki spoke there. In 1985, [49 artists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artists_United_Against_Apartheid) recorded the protest song “Sun City” with a chorus refusing to play the resort. One of the voices was Bob Geldof, who had organized [Live Aid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_at_Live_Aid) and called Queen “absolutely the best band of the day” that July.

Bophuthatswana ceased to exist on April 27, 1994. In 2021, drummer Roger Taylor gave his own verdict on the trip: “We went with the best intentions, but I still think it was kind of a mistake.”

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Sun City (South Africa)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_City,_North_West)

- [Wikipedia: Artists United Against Apartheid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artists_United_Against_Apartheid)

- [Wikipedia: Bophuthatswana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bophuthatswana)

*Illustrative image. Image: Matt Kieffer, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*