Richard Swart believes fate, luck and good contacts dictate your journey through life. So how did the son of a South African anti-apartheid politician find himself heading up a Durham business making metal closing rings? John Hill talks to the managing director of Berger Group (Europe).

LIKE any number of successful businessmen, Richard Swart is partly made up of a briefcase, a fistful of spreadsheets and a full calendar of meetings with far-flung clients.

He’s the well-travelled managing director of Berger Group (Europe), which means he knows the departure lounge of Newcastle Airport nearly as well as his own living room.

However, he also has a scrapbook. Like many of life’s intriguing things, it’s slightly frayed, and sits nervously in a modern coffee shop like a librarian in an Apple Store.

This thick scrapbook tells the story of Swart’s life before he took charge of the Durham City outpost of a German manufacturing firm, and the story of a country which fought itself – and the world – for several bitter, bloody years.

Swart was born in 1962, into a family of four children. As a child of Durban in South Africa, he was also born into apartheid, a shroud of racial segregation which suffocated the country between 1948 and 1994.

“South Africa was very strictly racially segregated and at war with itself,” he says.

“That meant separate beaches, schools, buses and separate entrances for post offices. When I was 12, the South African foreign minister went to the UN to make a dramatic announcement that public park benches were going to be desegregated. That was meant to be a signal of the start of the end of apartheid, but it was really just window dressing.”

His father Ray was a politician, a member of a select group of 12 MPs who fought apartheid by forming the Progressive Party in 1959. All but Houghton (Johannesburg) MP Helen Suzman lost their seat, and Suzman remained the only representative in parliament until 1974. She was a regular visitor to the Swart household, and was a guest at Richard’s 21st birthday and his wedding.

“My father made us aware from the beginning that we were not from a normal society,” he says. “We had friends of all races and were quite often at risk for that. We were born into an apartheid system, but he played a huge role in educating me that this was not normal.”

When Richard left school, he went on to Natal University to study psychology and history, but broke from his studies to study in Milwaukee as an exchange student.

He says: “Throughout school, America was the place to be. The great thing about America is there’s something for everybody. Of course, I went from sub-tropical Durban to freezing Milwaukee, which was a challenge.

“South Africa was world news at the time, so I did a lot of speeches to business dinners as an exchange student.

“One of my speeches was reported in a local Milwaukee newspaper. That got back to the South African foreign affairs minister, and my father was called in and asked what his son was doing criticising apartheid.”

Swart returned to Natal University and soon became student union president, a role that saw him give public speeches on the anti-apartheid movement.

“That was a very high profile role in the context of anti-apartheid. I got arrested a few times. At the time, if you had a cup with the African National Congress or Nelson Mandela on it, even that was considered a criminal offence.”

It is telling that when the time came to choose a career, Richard initially considered following his father into law, but gained a post-grad qualification as a schoolteacher, as he felt it gave him the best chance of being able to leave a divided country. However, from 1981 to 1987, he was drawn by a love for journalism into the office of the Sunday Tribune.

His scrapbook contains his articles on daily news of South Africa; clippings of floods, feuds, fascist rallies and heart-wrenching bombings.

Tucked inside these pages are photos of South African communities savaged by flooding, shots of visiting politicians and the haunting image of a small child clutching a box tagged with a swastika at a rally by notorious South African white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche.

Richard accompanied police to report on vice on the docks, travelled with the military by helicopter to deliver food to isolated villages, reported on political statements by the governing National Party, and collected statements from those who saw some of the struggle’s more horrifying moments.

On one occasion, journalists working in the office heard a loud explosion and turned to see a bombed car still airborne outside the window. During a bombing of the Durban Parade Hotel, which claimed lives in 1986, one of the unharmed witnesses he interviewed was his own younger brother.

“At the time, politics were a matter of life and death,” he says. “People were disappearing and being killed by the state. You had a white minority doing everything it could to protect itself.

“The rule was that if someone on the bus would read the story, you had a lot of freedom to write it. The TV at the time was state-controlled and very much a propaganda weapon, so the papers had a vital role.

“On a Sunday paper, you had time to work on stories of substance and do research. You could travel around the country. The English-language press and editors were extremely courageous. There were restrictions on the press, and they would put notices on the front page saying they were not allowed to report freely.

“Many defied the regulations and got charged and went to court. There were fines and sometimes people were jailed.

“We were trying our best to keep people informed and hopefully encourage change. It’s much less so now, but a while back, people used to think because I was a white South African it was okay for them to show their racism to me. I’m totally uncomfortable with racist jokes because there are people who died because of race.”

In 1987, Richard left to pursue his dream of working as a journalist in America. While his partner, Ariane, studied at university in Italy, he tried to secure work at the Los Angeles Times, but was unable to find a job in the news room.

He says: “I stayed in Redondo beach for about seven months. I did a range of jobs such as market research, but not the job I wanted.”

It was at that point that a job offer emerged out of left field; one that would send him thousands of miles away to a place he’d barely heard of before.

He says: “A German-owned family business had appointed a German manager to start off a manufacturing business in Durham, and it hadn’t worked out. They decided they wanted an English speaker. The owner knew an Italian, who knew a South African, who knew me. It was basically a character reference, because I knew nothing about manufacturing and didn’t know much about the North East beyond the stereotype.

“I thought it was an interesting opportunity, and I was young enough to take the chance. I suppose where we end up is a combination of luck, fate and having a good network. Journalism and psychology put me in a position where I was able to deal with different types of people.”