AfrikaBurn: That Other Thing In The Desert

The Burning Man Regional Network provides a framework for people to organize events in their own community which provide a different local flavor than That Thing In The Desert. Regional events are more convenient to the community than getting yourself to the Black Rock Desert, and as a bonus your regular camping gear works. Regionals in the USA are often run by folks who regularly attend the main Burning Man event (AKA the Gerlach Regional Burn), and many of the attendees have been at least once.

AfrikaBurn is close-ish to the antipode of the Black Rock Desert. It's a challenge to make it to the other side of the planet, particularly on a With African salary rather than an American one, so very few locals I met have been to the big burn. Cape Town is about as far from Europe as Reno is, so a lot of the attendees flew straight south. I'd guess most of them haven't been to the Black Rock edition of the Burn either.

So it was with delight that I discovered that the Burning Man experience is able to replicate and spread mostly mimetically, without relying on constant physical couriers of culture. 2026 AfrikaBurn felt to me like I imagine Burning Man felt a few years before my first burn in 2004, before two decades of "next year was better" and one-upsmanship made much of Burning Man larger than life. Tankwa Town has a population around 10,000 and you can feasibly check out every the camp. Art at AfrikaBurn is human-scale, but could easily show up on the playa and fit in. The mutant vehicles are Burning Man quality design and craftsmanship, though they've only started to reach the "two decker mobile sound camp" branch of the evolutionary tree. More importantly, it's easy to catch a ride. Many Burning Man art cars are full by the time they leave camp these days, and many operators have a sense of Radical Self Entitlement that they made the mutant vehicles to get themselves around the playa, rather than Gifting transportation in a wild ride.

Not only was the culture of Radical Stuff Entitlement absent, the Burning Man culture of snark, deception, and trolling also didn't make it across the pond: everyone was quite genuine. Burning Man was founded by Cacophanists and pranks have long been a flavor of the Radical Stuff Expression, but I found it quite refreshing that no one stole any street signs, nobody claimed Daft Punk was playing at the trash fence, nobody's first instinct was to give wrong answers to questions, and nobody's art was making fun of someone else's art. The only satire I found was the Department of Homely Affairs, where I got my Tankwa Town passport and joined their role play of ridiculous government process and paperwork. That's the sort of straight-faced shenanigans that I love to see at a burn.

Oh, and even the desert was more polite. The event is two months later in the season, so the heat of the day wasn't as intense. We got a bit of rain, but the ground didn't turn to mud. The air didn't feel as dry, so I kept questioning if I'd really only drank one bottle of water that day. My suitcase is dirty from wind blowing dust around, but my old and fragile backpackers tent held out just fine, and I don't need to wash all my gear now.

So hey, jaded American Burners: if you think the Gerlach Regional has gotten to big and impersonal, consider a trip to Tankwa Town!