Bond of broeders: Anton Hartman and music in an apartheid state

Musical Times, Summer 2004 by Walton, Chris

Anton Hanman: dis sy stone, by Mia Hartman, is published by Beria (Pretoria, 2003) at Riyo(c.US$2S).

THE LEADING MUSIC ADMINISTRATOR in South Africa': thus was Anton Hartman (1918-1982) described in 1975 upon his being awarded an honorary doctorate in music from his alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (hereafter 'Wits'). The description is accurate. Hartman was head of music at the South African Broadcasting Corporation for many years; he was for several years also the principal conductor of the SABC orchestra (and thus the most influential conductor in the country); he was responsible for taking that orchestra on tour to schools and town halls across the land in order to bring the delights of art music to children and adults who might otherwise never hear any music except the psalms they sang on Sundays; no snob, he conducted massed amateur choirs at state festive occasions; he brought the likes of Stravinsky and Stockhausen to South Africa to perform and talk; he commissioned and performed works by the country's most important composers - Stefans Grove, Arnold van Wyk, Hubert du Plessis, Graham Newcater, John Joubert and over a dozen others, on some occasions helping those composers to survive financially; and at the end of his life, he was appointed head of the Music Department of Wits. Altogether, a remarkable life and career of service to society.

And yet: the society served by that life and career was an unnatural one. Those children whose lives he enriched were all white, because no black child was allowed to sit next to a white child, either at school, in a concert hall, on a park bench or anywhere else; the massed choirs he conducted were all white, their festive occasions being in celebration of a white supremacist regime; and Hartman was himself a member - a leading member, by all accounts - of the Broederbond. The original aim of that band of white, Afrikaner brothers had been to improve the lot of its people: a people living under the oppression of the British Empire, a people still reeling from Britain's brutal, scorched-earth policies of the Boer War, a people whose language was not even officially recognised at the time. But - as Mia Hartman rightly observes - the oppressed rapidly became the oppressors. The Broederbond went 'underground', embracing a policy of secrecy, and became one of the driving forces behind the erection of the strange edifice that was apartheid. This policy of Aryan supremacy and racial purity had less in common with the colour bar of the American South than with the policies of Nazi Germany towards the Slavic peoples it conquered in 1940 and 1941. Behind the facade of 'separate development', non-white citizens were deprived of civic rights and proper education, their purpose being primarily to labour for the economic well-being of the white minority. Hartman was not an innocent bystander. he was not of those millions born by chance into an unjust system, nor could he claim 'political naivete'. No, he was actively involved in oiling the wicked engines of the state. Certainly the 'leading musical administrator' of his country, but also a sort of musical Gauleiter who was, through the Broederbond, one of the perpetrators and perpetuators of a political system that was (let us be blunt) evil.

AIT HAPPENS, the arch-Afrikaner Hartman was the product - as are nost Afrikaners today - of a 'mixed' marriage with one of the hated British. His middle name, Carlisle, was the maiden name of his paternal grandmother, whose nationality, however, still did not save her from being thrown into a concentration camp with her children during the Boer War (her Afrikaner husband was deported to Ceylon for the duration of the conflict). It was thus into an anti-British environment that Anton Hartman was born in 1918, the third of six children. His was a poor, staunchly Afrikaner, staunchly Calvinistic household. His mother was a piano teacher, his father an official at a mine outside Johannesburg and a keen amateur sportsman (becoming South African marathon champion, no less). Hartman Senior lost his job -when he sided with the white (largely Afrikaner) workers in their dispute over the abandonment of the colour bar (i.e. against the employment of cheaper, Black labour by the mine-owners). For a while, the family was reduced to living in a single room in a house owned by relatives. Hartman the elder did later regain a job at the mines, but was now forced to work underground.

Throughout the early pages of this book, the anti-Afrikaner discrimination practised by the largely English-speaking South African establishment of the 19205 and 19308 comes to the fore. Mia Hartman, the niece of the conductor, does not shy away from mentioning the resultant pro-Nazi sympathies of the Hartman household in the 19303, the Mein Kampf reading sessions, or the listening to the Afrikaans propaganda programmes broadcast by the German regime. Anton Hartman went to Helpmekaar Highschool, which Mia Hartman neglects to mention was not just the first-ever Afrikaans highschool in Johannesburg, but had been founded in 1921 by a group of men who included Joshua Naude, one of the 'Bittereinders' who had refused to sign the Peace Treaty that had ended the Anglo-Boer War in 1902, and who in 1918 became the first head of the Broederbond. While at Helpmekaar, Anton became a local leader in the 'Voortrekkers' - a sort of militant, Afrikaner boy-scout/girl-guide Ersatz movement. Mia Hartman's description of Anton leading the weekly marching drill in the.school hall, preceded by prayers and mixed with the singing of Afrikaans folk songs, would be slightly comical, did it not read like a scene from Hitlerjunge Quex or one of the other Nazi youth movies.