BONFIRE and a little VANITY
Yes, it’s a pale and privileged shot at utopia, but Afrika Burn offers a fleeting glimpse of our better selves — and one hell of a party.
‘YOU’RE going to Afrikaburn?” the radical journalist asked. “That’s a bunch of white people spending tons of cash to pretend they live in a Utopian gift economy.” She’s not wrong, but the description misses the essential point that it’s also a stupendous party.
If you had the chance to see a 4.5m R2D2 project a laser display onto a giant face of wood and steel, while a bus festooned with LEDs and a wall-of-sound system slowly circled you and hundreds of luminescent revellers, why wouldn’t you take it?
One reason is that my description makes the festival sound a bit like Ibiza.
It isn’t. I skipped over the experience of walking dazed and a little confused, boiled in the desert heat and whipped by Tankwa dust, to have a child approach and offer me an ice cream, or the time when a man in a funny hat appeared with a water pistol from behind a papier mâché daisy and sprayed Amarula into my mouth. Even that might sound a little contrived; a little cute, a bit too demonstratively antic.
But as all your Burner friends will never tire of telling you, you really do have to experience AfrikaBurn to understand.
Because it’s all done in the rare spirit of self-expression combined with fellow-feeling, of finding individuality in community. It’s a lesson in how much each self is defined by its relation to each other. The unconscious plan before each AfrikaBurn is surely to be yourself, and invariably, one finds oneself in the community of one’s fellows, all magically aligned in consciousness, after days of hedonistic interpersonal reliance.
My fear for this year’s Burn, the biggest yet, was that the influx of boykies and newbies would debase the spirit, turning it into a stripmall nightclub in the desert. It was an ungenerous anxiety; the dust works its alchemy and, whoever you were at home, you transform into a Burner.
Does that sound ridiculous? It sounds ridiculous to me now, trying to hear myself type over the tumult of commerce and road rage. And even as we were queuing to drive out of camp, the spell had already begun to dissipate, as men in bakkies with biceps jostled for position, reminding us that we are still South Africans, with our macho aggression and hyper-competitiveness. And already there are futile arguments on social media about who did and did not realise the “real” spirit of AfrikaBurn.
But that’s all Utopias can really do: act as moments of fleeting perfection, reminding us that we are better than our imperfect world usually lets us recognise.
Which is not to say AfrikaBurn is a free-for-all. There are rules, and they are non-negotiable, but they’re stripped down to the basic requirements for preserving Burners’ safety, decorum and good vibes. It’s like being present at the birth of the social contract.
The transparent logic of the Burn law was best exemplified for me a few years ago, when a volunteer ranger said there was a drug dealer on the grounds whom he was desperate to intercept. Selling drugs is, of course, strictly against the spirit of the Burn. You should give them away.
I was given another insight into the social contract when I was spontaneously deputised as a marshal, tasked with holding the line before the burning of Cape Town artist Daniel Popper’s gargantuan Reflections , a 9m-high plywood man with a heart of LED, built with collective cash and the sweat of volunteers. The statue was constructed for AfrikaBurn 2013 and, after resting in the desert for a year, was set to be sacrificed in an epic conflagration.
Here the rules were tested, but it was by a crowd surging forward with enthusiasm, desiring only to see and feel and taste the fire, to be in the marrow of the ritual. They needed to be scolded repeatedly, but then the fire started and the blaze was not just elemental, but dangerous, a monstrous wave of heat that caused us to scramble backward in gleeful terror.
So much of AfrikaBurn is centred on the spectacle, on varying permutations of big, shiny and loud. The most delightful surprise was therefore The Grannies — a group of young performers who transformed themselves not just with costumes and prosthetic granny heads, but also with years of scrupulously honed artistry. I didn’t know subtlety could have such an outsized impact amid spectacle.
Culture in anything but its most commercialised forms has always been opened to a more or less limited audience. Not everyone can take a week to camp and gawk and, let’s not be coy about this, take a lot of drugs. But if it’s a privileged space in which the middle classes can indulge in enlightened hedonism with impunity, the injustice isn’t that they are “getting away with it” but rather that the licence isn’t extended to the rest of the country.
In the ghettos of the world, drugs are invariably taken as either cause or symptom of social malaise, never as a bit of fun. Frankly, in our unequal land, this disparity describes an ordinary day in Cape Town.
So where were the radicals and the poets? The simple answer is that they didn’t show up. They can come — they can raise funds for themselves or their emissaries. AfrikaBurn is whatever it’s made to be — and whatever it isn’t, it isn’t because you haven’t made it that way. If you feel Burners have gaps in their political education, come on over and teach us about them.
How to include the poor and dispossessed is another, more difficult, challenge. But it’s not an impossible one. And we could all use a shot of Utopia. — @axaxaxasimon