Experience AfrikaBurn: A journey through Tankwa Karoo

Afrikaburn 2025 is officially under way, lighting up the Karoo desert's skies with wild creativity, fiery art installations, and a community ready to celebrate freedom and expression. 

This year's festival sees thousands flocking to the Karoo to gaze at the giant wooden sculptures engulfed in flames, quirky handmade vehicles cruising the dust, and eye-catching outfits..

It's a one-of-a-kind party where art, self-reliance, and radical fun collide under the wide-open South African sky.

This year's theme, Out of the Blue, celebrates the all-encompassing world underneath. And with each year, the Karoo welcomes a new crowd. With familiar faces returning, and first-time burners who get to sound the gong upon arrival. 

From afar, it looks like a vision from another planet.

It would be easy to mistake AfrikaBurn for pure escapism, a psychedelic playground far above the gravity of real-world concerns, where tales of belonging and exclusion come to life.

Afrikaburn emphasizes a world where status and hierarchy fall away, where connection feels simple and unmediated, where creativity is not a commodity but a basic human instinct.

Yet the desert is not a vacuum. Outside realities seep in.

Long-time burners speak of the tension between radical expression and unconscious exclusion. In a country where inequality runs deep, true escape is a luxury not all can afford.

Even the logistics of survival, tents, water, and transport require resources that many do not possess.

Escapism, in the end, is not evenly distributed.

Not a luxurious utopia

AfrikaBurn was never intended to be a luxury event. It rejects sponsorships, bans cash transactions, and enshrines gifting as a core principle. Yet despite its best intentions, it has increasingly become a utopia accessible mainly to the privileged.

Organisers have made efforts to lower them. Subsidised tickets, shared transport initiatives, and community engagement projects all have grown in recent years.

Nevertheless, the demographic makeup of the Burn remains heavily skewed. In this, AfrikaBurn mirrors the unfinished project of the nation itself, the ongoing struggle to turn ideals of equality into a lived reality.

There is a cruel irony in a utopia that is inaccessible to most. Yet there is also something brutally honest about it. AfrikaBurn does not pretend to have solved South Africa’s divisions. Instead, it holds up a mirror, sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal, to the dreams and fractures that live within its temporary city.

AfrikaBurn fiercely protects the principle of immediacy. There are no stages, no scheduled performances, no boundaries between creator and observer. Cell signal is scarce by design. Yet in the aftermath, the imagery of Afrikaburn floods social media platforms.

There are no vendors, no advertising, no performers set apart from the audience. The city belongs to everyone, or at least that is the promise. Everyone brings something. Everyone contributes to the fabric of Afrikaburn, be it a conversation, a dance, or a hand-built shelter strung with lights and laughter.

Yet even in this celebration of radical inclusion, questions rise from the dust. Who can reach this distant, demanding desert?

Who can afford to gift without expecting a return? In a country where most still struggle for basic rights and security, AfrikaBurn, despite its dreams, often reflects the same imbalances it hopes to transcend.

AfrikaBurn’s founding principles call for immediacy, participation, self-expression, and communal effort. For many, these ideals offer a profound form of escape, not simply from the daily grind, but from the rigid structures of identity, history, and expectation.

In Tankwa Town, participants shed their uniforms of modern life. CEOs dance barefoot with students. Painters swap philosophies with accountants.

Queer, straight, black, white, rich, poor, the usual divisions blur beneath layers of dust and creativity.

In a nation still reckoning with inequality and social division, AfrikaBurn offers a glimpse into a different mode of being. One where exchange is not transactional, where art is made to be experienced rather than sold, and where participation is valued more than presentation.

At the same time, this year, one can only begin to start their journey, asking ongoing questions about access, privilege, and who truly gets to participate in these kinds of experimental spaces.

For many, the challenge now is what comes next. What happens when the music stops, when the costumes are packed away, and the signal bars return? 

Because AfrikaBurn may disappear from the landscape after this year's event, but for those who are to experience what happens in the Karoo, footprints dancing in the sand are imprinted long after the last ash turns to dust. 

As one ventures to the world afar, may it beckon you with a sense of grace for the world we find ourselves in.

IOL