Open hearts are turning brass into pure gold

Last edited: February 03, 2010

Posted by Business and Arts South Africa

Written by Katy Chance

Source: Business Day
To visit Business Day online click here.

It’s one of those “50% chance” days at Setlola Mathe Primary School in Kagiso. It’s been grey and drizzling all day, but now there are heavy, black clouds fighting for space with dazzling bolts of blue. It could go either way as the kids, from tiny to big enough to support a tuba on one shoulder, start their Field Band Foundation (FBF) rehearsal. Fortunately, the sun shines on them. Takatso Mtshwene is here as he is every Monday and Wednesday afternoon to help tutor. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons he’s at a school in Dobsonville. Every weekday morning he plays full-time with the air force band based in Pretoria. He lives in Meadowlands, Soweto. He has no car and spends a huge amount of his working day in taxis between bands. The word “committed” takes on new meaning in Mtshwene. His instrument of choice is the trumpet — “Of course!” — but he plays French horn for the air force because they didn’t have room for another trumpeter.

Mtshwene started playing with the foundation at 14 in 1997, the year Bertie Lubner founded it. The list of patrons and sponsors for the foundation is long. Its main supporters are De Beers, the PG Group, the Anglo American Chairman’s Fund, Black Like Me, Investec and Remgro/Venfin. The foundation won the Business and Arts South Africa Chairman’s Premier Award last year, and this year the FBF Academy open in temporary KwaZulu-Natal premises. This ragtag group of children in the school’s backyard, surrounded by locked, barred doors and broken windows, belies a huge and hugely successful social investment and community development initiative that will be in all nine provinces this year. Mtshwene has played the trumpet since age 11 through his church near Brakpan, where his pastor taught him. “My parents were alcoholics. Home life was not always easy. My parents couldn’t get jobs and were not emotionally supportive.” He found succour in his music. Later moving to Dobsonville with his aunt, at his mother’s request, Mtshwene was looking for a church band, but couldn’t find one. A friend, already involved with the Field Band Foundation took him to “a place where he knew there were instruments” and Mtshwene was soon back to trumpeting two afternoons a week after school. “I was incredibly lucky to get two brilliant professional trumpet players tutoring me: Prince Lengoasa and the late Papi Maloagae. Seeing two black guys making a living from playing the trumpet — after that I couldn’t see myself doing anything else,” says Mtshwene.

But turning out professional musicians is not necessarily the foundation’s function. “Bertie Lubner saw the potential of field bands for the youth,” says the foundation’s CEO, Retha Cilliers, “because they are ‘cheerful but disciplined’. So the foundation goes into the areas where help is needed most. We identify schools within walking distance of each other, and get a headmaster’s buy-in to use the premises. It can be seen as an extracurricular activity, but it goes well beyond that.” Social development through the arts, especially music and dance, is really the goal. Every one of the foundation’s projects — last year it had 17 projects with more than 4 000 members in 109 townships — has an allocated social development officer. “We have a bigger remit, outside of music,” says Cilliers, although they “have one guy who is a senior cadet with the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic, and one dancer is in the Lion King in Europe.” The community officers identify child-headed households through extensive
questionnaires. From these they create a database for those most in need of intervention. The parents may be dead, absent or only intermittently at home so the development officers organise school uniforms, household essentials from mattresses to kitchen utensils, and see the children regularly through rehearsals, and privately once a month. They are taught household management, first aid, conflict management, and the foundation works closely with the local municipality in getting birth certificates and ID books and ensuring local authorities “have their eye on them”.

They also identify an adult as a mentor in the community. Everyone has everyone else’s back. “The foundation does help those who are serious about music,” says Mtshwene. “But it also brings hope to these kids and teaches them life skills and educates them about HIV. “And if anyone knows of someone in trouble — they’ll talk to Field Band first.” The foundation has the capacity for 125 per band. A
truck will arrive at a school with 86 instruments and four tutors, over 18, all of whom have come through the foundation, many of whom will have spent a year overseas studying. Says Cilliers: “At a grassroots level, this can be seen as crime prevention. The vulnerable adolescents and teenagers are the most likely to fall into or be forced into crime to survive.” This echoes Mtshwene, who says “how easy” it is to get dagga and alcohol on the streets in Kagiso, a place he describes as boring. “There are no extracurricular activities at the school — oh, except sport, obviously,” he says, one eyebrow
raised.

Of his own life, Mtshwene admits he has no idea what it would be like without the foundation, but sums it up with one word: worse. He is one of those “serious about music”. Cilliers recognised his talent and organised a threemonth stint with a drum corps in New Jersey, US, in 2000. It’s a very intensive course from which, says Cilliers, the teenagers often came back exhausted, but it shows personal and cultural resilience. On the trip with Mtshwene was Andes Doubell, a trombone player, who is now the foundation’s national projects officer. Mtshwene confirms how intense the trip was. “We rehearsed from 6am to 10pm, but it was a good thing. It boosted my morale, and was a real boost to my English, which I’ve never been confident in.” Not long after his return, while still adjusting to the culture shock of the US, Cilliers organised Mtshwene going to Norway for a year, studying at Toneheim Folkehøyskule. Two of the foundation’s major supporters are the Norwegian Band Federation and Nor way’s Fredskorpset, which sends young Norwegian tutors to SA. Norway is simply band mad with brass bands “central to the country’s national identify”, according to Cilliers. Perhaps all the marching helps
keep them warm. For Mtshwene, going straight from school to Norway meant more culture shock and more musical focus. “The Norwegians are really, really nice people. The hospitality was amazing, and they just love bands. They grow up with it; no kid in Norway is without an instrument in the home. They learn music at school and can read music from a very young age.” In Norway, Mtshwene’s music reading and writing skills were honed, and he started to focus seriously on his future.

“My life changed in terms of planning. You can become yourself in a situation like that, you can live life normally and think about what you want to do and how to achieve it. There’s no HIV and no crime. It was wonderful, but a bit difficult when I got back.” The third- and first-world culture shock in these frequent exchange programmes is something Cilliers and the foundation help monitor. And it’s going home for both “wo r l d s ” that is the hardest. It can be as difficult for a Norwegian to adjust to Norway after a year in SA as the other way around. After his year away, the foundation ensured Mtshwene continued touring Norway and Belgium, and he continues to travel throughout SA when he can, playing and tutoring for the foundation. As much as he loved Norway, his roots are in SA. Although his other has since died, he is close to his siblings, and determined to pass on what he has learnt. It was through Cilliers, who Mtshwene calls “his CEO”, that he auditioned for a full-time position at the air force and, prepared to forgo his beloved trumpet for the French horn for as long as he has to. His long-term goal is to manage his own large brass band, and he’s working towards that with his writing for the small band he has with a group of friends. “On Saturdays, we rehearse or play at weddings and funerals.” On Sundays, he has a much needed day off, which he spends with his girlfriend, who is clearly playing second fiddle to something smaller and altogether more brassy. “Who knows?,” says Mtshwene wistfully. “Perhaps one of those two trumpeters at the air force band will resign.”