As sunrise unveiled the silhouette of Table Mountain, Flemming, aged 23, stepped ashore in Cape Town to start his peregrine career under the deepening shadow of apartheid.
He was born Danish in colonial Malaya and fled the Japanese invasion to spend World War II in Australia as a refugee before returning to liberated Denmark.
His education included the perils of wartime, trauma of family separations, deprivations of post-war recovery and ten schools before graduation from Cambridge University.
Flemming rises to become CEO of Metal Box South Africa, at the confluence of economic enterprise and sociopolitical turbulence engendered by creeping apartheid.
The Sharpeville massacre jolts the world.
He has an unbeknownst brush with history as a dinner guest of his friend, Arthur Goldreich, later identified as the covert head of the Communist Party's military wing in Sub-Saharan Africa, and learns that the dignified servant in pristine white uniform attending to his needs at dinner was Nelson Mandela in hiding.
In London he proudly appears before a House of Commons Committee of Enquiry into the conditions of blacks employed by British companies in South Africa, proving The Manchester Guardian's reporter, Adam Raphael, to be deviously dishonest.
Flemming is betrayed by British colleagues and realizes that any reversal of apartheid is not in the cards, so he and his South African wife move to America, where he joins Continental Can Company.
Promotion takes him back to Europe's industrial arena, where the post-war stranglehold of socialism is still obstructing recovery.
Dutch and German corporate politics are as vicious as those of the UK and America.
New challenges are welcomed in the USA, but the eight-year stint with Continental Can ends with a corporate dogfight.
The leveraged buyouts (LBOs) of the 80s prompt Flemming to persuade Lazard in New York to help organize the acquisition of American Can Company's Canadian subsidiary.
The lead investor is Onex Capital of Toronto, so.
C. Flemming Heilmann The unacceptable face: a 21st century story of an itinerant career under apartheid, european socialism and disparate iterations of capitalism, hardcover/flemming heilmann
