“I never noticed that before.” After about an hour of stomping through the desert you start to see shit. “The logo’s a virus.”
At that moment I was looking up at the main art installation in Tankwa Town, the semi-circular desert city established for AfrikaBurn 2012. The logo, suspended this year above a massive wooden smokestack structure, is of a multi-legged, multi-headed stickman. When I looked up at it though, it seemed more like the old drawings I did of a virus cell in high school biology, writhing like the hydra against the petri dish backdrop of a blue sky.
The traditions of this little non-town in Tankwa, Karoo involve the construction of massive artworks that are later ceremoniously destroyed in massive bonfires while people dance around them, revelling, experiencing revelation, or maybe a little of both. In the middle of my first Friday afternoon there, I wasn’t sure what it would be like to see this enormous tower collapse in the dark. Whatever it would look like, I struggled to imagine it drawing supreme collective awe from a massive group of people. When it happened on Saturday night, though, The Universe seemed to take hold of me in a moment of raw transformative revelation.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
AfrikaBurn is like no other festival I’ve ever been to. In fact, it isn’t much like anywhere I’ve been in my life. The event is held every year and plays host to a population that’s 5000-strong – many of them in glorious homemade costumes or riding around in transformed “mutant” vehicles. At local events like Oppikoppi we’re all gonna see the guy running around in the nutsack-cupping one-piece from “Borat”, but at AfrikaBurn there’s such a variety of people, each expressing themselves in such vivid and mind-fucking ways, that it can be near impossible to be sure that what you’re seeing is even real at all.
In Tankwa Town, you may as well set your wallet on fire at the gate, because the local economy runs solely on the idea of gifting. My first night at the Burn, my camp disappeared in a cloud of Bedouin dust. I wandered around for a while, but couldn’t find any sign of the folks I’d arrived with. An artist running The Gay Lounge theme tent – the tents occupying the main “binnekring” area of the festival are all themed somehow – offered me a place to crash if I didn’t find my friends before sunset. He made sure that I (and everyone else that stepped inside his harem tent) was given food, drinks and a cool place to acclimate themselves in the surrounding Martian landscape. The next morning I found I’d been left with a warm blanket and a roll of TP, just in case I decided to brave the pit toilets. This is the sort of compassion you don’t receive easily in the city. When a little girl held up a STOP sign to my chest and teasingly asked me to pay the toll if I hoped to get by her, all I had on me was my “magic” black BIC pen. The way she received it, though, made it seem like I’d just handed a girl from the urban sprawl a pair of diamond earrings. The sort of genuine acceptance and glee on her face is what permeates the culture of the entire festival. Folks can volunteer to help out at the theme tents months in advance, and there’s pretty much no time when you won’t meet eyes with a passing stranger and receive a smile in return.
No gift is too small at AfrikaBurn.
On Saturday night, now in the company of my own little camp family, I stood at the smokestack for the main San Clan burn. Without any nearby toxic city lights, the sky seemed like a massive reflection of the gathered people. Clouds stood in for clusters of human beings and the black sky was the desert dirt. Standing in the wind tunnel when the crowd had been forced apart, glowing hot embers riding the winds, I had my powerful shamanic-style moment of revelation.
Staring up at that big burning beacon in the night, I couldn’t help but let my thoughts be seized by the realization that each of us is a burning ember caught in the wind, desperately clinging to that solid, familiar structure of what we used to be. Still, the wind’s dragging us off into the uncertain dark desert night and we’re desperate to ignore where we are at any given moment. We’re completely preoccupied with everything we were and terrified to look ahead at whatever we’ll be. I realize this is the sort of stoner philosophy people roll their eyes at, but I firmly believe that everything is a microcosm of everything else. After that I had nothing else left to do but follow a buddy as he ran through the fire. Literally.
That one experience epitomized everything that AfrikaBurn represents to me as much as that artist draping a blanket over me in the dark or the little girl clutching my click pen like it was made of gold. It’s not just a place where people go to run away from the city and the banality of life on the 9-to-5 freeway. It’s not just another party venue you can escape to to bash your head to psy-trance and live out your Irvine Welsh-styled fantasy life. It’s about experiencing human beings as they express themselves in a free, open environment.
I’ve no doubt there’ll be more people making the journey next year, and in future years, and as new eyes discover what’s out there at Tankwa Town, new feet will settle in the soil. Either the Burn itself will be seized or someone will try and replicate its success a little closer to the 3-meter-high walls and tarred roads of “home”.
The thing about AfrikaBurn though is that it’s not really about a place or a time. In that sense it’s far more than a festival. It’s an opportunity and a culture – a thought buried deep inside every living person that’s stronger than every bad thing we tell ourselves about the world every damn day. The marketing machine may one day reach out for it, cling to its atmosphere and taste its rich resources, but for now that place is an untouched storyground for something better.
The story of the human virus.