Burn Return
Homes #5: Out of the Blue @ Afrikaburn
Last week I released the audio version of my first article in the ‘Tales from the Bundu’ series, Fynbos & Forest on the podcast, which you can hear here or on all major platforms.
Of course, describing Afrikaburn as a kind of home is hardly revolutionary. The arrival signs have been saying “Welcome Home” to newcomers and returnees since the beginning. Sometimes it takes you a while to figure out what makes it home: sometimes the outbreath comes sooner, or even instantly. But after a sequence of Burns - 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, at the old Northern Cape ‘Stonehenge’ farm - this is my first trip back to see what it's become. To see if, in 2025, I can still dive into the wild swirling vortex of creative energies, and find Home here. Which really, for me, means finding Spirit in the chaos. Finding the stillness in the polarities, the churning moving centre. The divinity.
It’s dusk when we arrive, and soon after it’s dark, so this time we don't actually see those ‘home’ signs, though plenty of friendly faces holding torches light the way in. The autumnal desert landscape has settled, the stars have appeared once more. The scorpion above, as it is below: multiple signs up to beware of the critters, rather more common in this new venue it appears than in the old one I remember. The queue was long – hours long – so we gathered instruments and started a live performance while we waited, and soon there was a DJ set going to jam along with. Because Afrikaburn really is a kind of Truman Show inverted: yes, it’s all a play, so take on your role and participate.
While Burning Man creates what sounds like an insanely large temporary desert city, Afrikaburn does things on a more manageable scale, thankfully: 10 000 participants rather than 100 000. So Tankwa Town, in its process of annual re-creation tonight, will be a place where magic can happen. However, I’m a little reluctant in this reflective piece of writing to join the Insta-crowds and the earnest arts journalists. This is more a personal take on what this year’s Burn was for me, a decade after my last visit. Everyone has their own journey, after all. A brief look at the programme details a dazzling array of stuff that was intended to happen, most of which I never saw, because I was seeing other things, much of which was never intended at all. Synchronicities happen so quickly these days, when the phones get switched off. Though there was a rather rude workaround I came across several times on the weekend, when the crowds had really arrived; groups with walkie-talkies, cheating completely in my personal purist book. Immediacy is a key Burn principle, and if the person you were expecting to meet now isn’t there, the true idea is to look around, see what else is there, and connect. That is always rewarding if you allow it to be.
Of course, this also means being truly comfortable with yourself, because what might be around you is just the special magic of rocks, slate, sand, and scrub. So I made it a rule in the past – and equally this time – to spend decent time in the desert, beyond the hazy perimeter of the playa. Fences don’t mean much out here. Someone I met earned their free, unnoticed entrance by running in from 40 kilometres away; someone else cycled. For most of us, the ticket price was the way in, and it’s still pretty high in rands/earnings terms. The Burn this time was still mostly South African, but a lot less so than I remember. Nearly half the tickets went to foreigners here for ‘The Best Party on Earth’, as the Guardian notoriously called it long ago. Some of the tickets went to Russians at the far end of the playa, creating a theme camp that looked more like a high-end night club with the help of a lot of money changing hands to get it set up; not exactly in the spirit of the 11 principles, but hey, it’s where a lot of people were drawn by the midnight hours. The Burn is anarchy in action and inevitably some of the energy is a little darker, honeytraps that can knock you off course. One friend I bumped into on weekend Night Watch duty is also by day monitoring darker energies online for his day job. He looked out across the playa as if he was watching for secret service activities; who knows, but if Spirit is there, it must mean creation is there in its totality.
At the other end, the desire to improve on the Burn being the ‘photographic negative image’ of South African diversity seems to have made decent progress since last time I was here. Those principles sound great but in the past the charge was strong that it was being led by Trustafarians paying lip service to something transformational. It’s beginning to look like some of that creatively angry Burn energy is settling into that principle of Community. And even the pale South Africans have changed somewhat: there’s a larger number of Afrikaners from the platteland than I recall. The earliest Burns invited local farmers in and the word has got around. Not your average boerie and braai weekend, though I did try some ‘Boer cocaine’ (a tobacco snuff machine, which certainly cleared the head).
Meanwhile, in my own journey? Spirit does guide, I believe, and when I looked back at the crazy wonderful human town from the vantage point of the desert, I saw creative fire in action, in the same way that an ayahuasca journey might. Afrikaburn is instantly psychedelic, even without the amount of substances many are consuming: there’s the liminal edge that human art aims at, and as such the journey can be one of playing with forces we wild ones don’t properly appreciate, and ancient lineages would have helped us navigate. Tibetans created spiritual guidebooks for playing between levels of other realities. Now, at this Burn we’ve made up, we have to create such offbeat guidance for ourselves. I well recall a strange moment of epiphany at a previous Burn where I recognised the vital importance of water, as life-giver but also as lubricant for keeping the dance through this crucible moving. Now there are signs everywhere reminding us to hydrate, which I would see as an invitation for keeping going with the relentless journey. Still, on the Saturday night I watched a small burn, felt into what I truly needed, and ended up back at camp reading over a cup of hot chai. The Clan itself – the artistic centrepiece of an event where the centre you need might be anywhere, actually - was another spooky combination of pixelated tech and ancient symbology, like another Clan I was involved with. I felt I didn’t need the wild energies of Saturday night’s ego-burning on the playa this time around, having already checked my ego in at the requisite booth during the week. Instead I opened my book and, of course, it was all about sacred fire. Because, synchronicity. The kind of impossible coincidences like meeting an old piano student of mine about to run a sound journey, some days after conversing with his father for the first time in years – and hearing about the son’s successful sound journey offerings without knowing he’d be here – and coming to the Burn with his dad’s new book in my backpack, a time-jumping novella by Mike Cope, of a holy love story set in ancient Ugarit and False Bay.
So what did I read that night? Arkan Lushwala, Peruvian shaman, in The Time of the Black Jaguar talking of how he had lit sacred fire, with prayers, in a part of New England that had lacked such fires since the time of the genocide of the native Americans there. Talking about how a black bear, after initial wariness, had emerged; he had sensed it was there, grateful for the fire being lit. Because the lighting of fires is what other beings in nature recognise in us, and valued in us before we started using fire so destructively. Of course, one native American tradition has it that the ‘white race’ had responsibility for fire, and then let it get wildly out of control, while other tribes were in charge of other elements. I recently watched The Last Airbender at last, and was not surprised at all that the hi-tech baddies were the fire nation. The day we left Cape Town for the Burn, arsonists had lit a bush fire on the southern mountain range I love, and it was raging still without us knowing for sure what had happened, once our cellphones lost reception. Bringing us back to sacred fire: and yet the wild anarchy of the party too. JOMO, the joy of missing out, was a regular practice for me this time in the desert: I didn’t need to personally feel the great experience of the burning sphere, for example; I could sense the majesty in the resonant reflections of others. Love was being spread rather than danger. The next night, I did attend the main burn; the heart of Afrikaburn, you see, is actually the Temple burning on Sunday evening, with a silent crowd, once the weekend partygoers had headed off. The last time I was here a decade ago, not everyone respected the requested Sunday silence, and yet this time not only did they, but the Temple had been created by the Department of Public Works.
DPW are the hardcore volunteers. When you pack up a theme camp, some representative of DPW will appear, usually rather brusquely asking for beer, drugs and other treats, because they’re going to be in the desert long after the regular attendees have departed. They’ve built the roads and the toilets and are holding the physical framework together; and they’ll take it all down again and return this land to the desert for the next 11 months; and they’ve often been those with a rougher edge than most, the middle-finger-raised bikers who put the anarchic tension into the whole experience. The DPW toilet-cleaning team for example (removing 10 000 people’s waste for composting on a daily basis) were understandably among the loudest-mouthed bunch this time around. When not one but two dedicated sculpture teams had to forego their contracted commitment to creating the temple, DPW stepped in. Overnight, they crafted a Temple; not grandiose, but a subtle spiral leading in to the core, to what people were invited during the week to let go of, to move forward. A spiritual moment: and in its burning, I marvelled at the way the Burn doesn’t just break taboos, it brings together beautiful paradoxes. DPW knew the importance of the Temple burn, in the way that casual partygoers didn’t. Coming away from it, in something of a reverie, a new friend and I passed two guys lying oblivious in the dark dust, one face down. “I don’t understand!” he groaned. Clearly, not everybody makes it through this journey in one piece; in fact if we’re awake we just see the pieces more starkly - though I expect some understanding might have sunk in with the guy in the dust, once the heightened moments of the week had settled, assuming he didn’t try numb it with more pills.
Artistic humanity. A wooden sangoma with a piercing gaze. My friend’s design dream of a giant potjie pot coming to fruition, where people could meet in that South African way; a rainbow, amidst the midweek cold and showers, striking the playa so magically you’d have to be deeply shut off not to recognise spirit at work – from one angle landing right in the potjie pot of gold. Looking up in a tender moment and seeing a perfectly formed heart shaped cloud. A little iguana, preening for four strangers who met around it, noticed when I stopped for a desert pee having taken a wrong turn. Ceramic hands, beautifully painted as a guide for finding one’s centre. Three angelic goddesses striving upwards; a mother earth-goddess, pregnant and guiding one to rebirth. To be honest, there were always a lot of artistic calls to spirit here, though this time it felt more widespread than I remember, more conscious morning activities, yoga stretching and breathing and tuning in to balance the nightlife. Though at the same time that nightlife was itself driven beyond natural capacity, with quiet time only at 7am, when I was waking from my herbal-sleeping-pill-strong-earplug-assisted down time. Those mutant vehicles were often pretty exquisite, as were some of their sounds: live violin over electronica from a beautiful giant porcupine on wheels. Jellyfish glided past, as did a lanternfish with a velvet upper storey. An elephant shot flames into the air from its trunk. A meerkat, perhaps emulating the ones whose holes we saw. And yet. From a distance at sunset, the exquisite mindwarp swarms of playa vehicles also throw up a grimy competitive edge, DJs with egos, and this is why the music can’t stop. Sometimes that bass note became just too dark, and we needed to retreat to the edge of the Binnekring for some juicy Latin sounds or even a little Gloria Gaynor. Music is one of the keys to this great game of life, and it’s definitely one of the keys to the Burn, but all these beats and all that alcohol (which I avoided, except for an enamel cup of box wine on the last night) make that vibe drive into the bones. I only felt free from the constant doof-doof in my cells when diving into a mountain dam on the way home.
So we made music, of course, at our Marmajam camp. I took my brass and joined with strings and drums and voices and we created an unexpected wetland of organic sound several times in the week. A mandolin player called Coyote joined us; a rapper called Phoenix wowed us, and another more local Xhosa wordsmith sounding out rapid-fire clicks while he strummed. On which note, the phoenix burned magnificently and has probably changed me in ways I don’t yet know; there is always some kind of rebirth when there’s that much crazy creativity around, I feel. And perhaps when there’s that amount of brazenly innocent nakedness too, some of it in full metallic bodypaint of course. Still, even in a place where people felt safety to be more bare, I also found my fix of conscious dance at the Heart Space to sweeten the whole week. The poetry apothecary pedlar’s stall was rolled out to the Binnekring and created moments of enchantment for those in the right place at the right time. The storytellers’ chair heard moments of rural Afrikaans hilarity and deep Xhosa mythology. I picked up poems I hadn’t punched out to an audience for a while and found a new groove, for which I’m grateful.
Of course I’m grateful. Gifts are everywhere. One of the principles of course. There’s commercialism in the background and there’s irritations in the institution and there’s favouritism and there’s genuine gripes. But gifting is still the drive. One gift I initially missed, because on my first morning after a night on the desert floor, a queeny northern US voice invites me and those I’m walking alongside to “come in my mouth!” Yoh, a bit early for that kind of crass Burn-speak dude I think, especially as it’s next to the spanking theme camp. Actually there’s an artistic mouth with a red carpet tongue, which I see the next time I pass, and realize there are burlesque outfits gifting morning pancakes that are well worth a stop for, and a chat, and a boogie, and sharing in the joy. The gifts I received came in many forms, human, energetic, physical, smiling, whimsical. Friends are another key to life and to the Burn; even as we launch into our own journeys, it’s good to come back to the bigger solar system as it powers through the space. I made a staff ten years ago as a call from my Burn group that year. Holding the staff is a lesson in journeying together: I had my moment of holding space for others to get lost and find their way back to it, lit up with fairy lights and baubles in the darkness, until I could hand it on to somebody else who was ready for the burden. Human history can probably be condensed into the staff’s journey, and I’m grateful to those who stepped up to hold it this time for me.
My journey back from this ‘home’ to my Muizenberg one was not the expected route or with the person I’d expected to travel with: it was driven by necessity over the crackling energy of the Cederberg. Rocks watching, moving, painting. A gradual return, dripping with wisely crazy experiences. My new friend finds the right stones to scratch to make tints of ochre on a pebble. He knows how to look for hoodia, the appetite-supressing nature-drug of ancient Bushman choice.
The Rules, and the Breaking of the Rules; form and freedom. But I guess what makes it a success may be mostly the 11th principle, the one that the new kid, Afrikaburn, made up all by itself (where the other ten already inspired the older sibling, Burning Man). Each One Teach One. Plenty of people not getting the idea, but every conversation might be a gentle opportunity for learning, for teaching, for uncovering more of what the hell we think we’re up to here. I’m not sure the field mice quite think we’re leaving no trace, let alone the scorpions, though people are doing their best to be better, amidst those who just need to go bos. It was good to be back, even though it’s always new. Good to see new generations finding ways to spark their own buzz-fuzz journeys and let loose from the crazy city consciousness of our times. I might prefer my own gatherings less druggy and boozy, and less noisy all the time, so I guess part of my journey was in just realizing I could still manage it, still break through to the dark side myself a little (even if the excess of lasers meant I sometimes felt like I was in a cage in the desert, which was a little disconcerting); still bring back a little more love for humanity. That is the point in the end. Even if there are crass techno-forms that delight with false light, like those lasers (one of which I followed to its source, a random suburban bakkie). I’d rather follow the guy with a fake fish on the end of his line that he was following like a divining rod, who chatted to me in broad Capetonian, and turned up again to give me a profound comment from divinity. He might not have known it was divinity, but it was perfectly timed for me as the gift from source I needed in a challenging moment.
In the end, this is almost an article that writes itself, because there’s so much to be acknowledged, to comment on, and the heart of it all is the smiling hearts of the humans there in all their crusty glory. Light those fires, with as much love as you can bear.