AfrikaBurn 2024: 29 April to 5 May

Image credit: Steven Morrow

Whether you’ve attended AfrikaBurn before or not, all you need to know about making your experience incredible is located here, from what it’s all about, the theme for this year, to how to get Tickets and where to find the Survival Guide Quaggapedia. Whatever you do at AfrikaBurn, it’s all about Participation.

AfrikaBurn is what YOU make of it, and the more you put in, the more you get out. It’s a neverending cycle of great ideas and hard work, and you’re invited to play along. Click the button to sign up as a General Volunteer.

Art & Performances

Wanna be part of the big experiment? If you’re keen to create art and make music, or burn things and perform circus acts, this is your spot. 

Theme camps

Wanna create a SPACE for the community? Theme Camps are gifted experiences dotted around our city. If you’re looking to create a community space. Click here. 

Mutant vehicles

Bringing a mobile artwork, or want to carry people around Tankwa Town? You’ll be wanting to register with the Department of Mutant Vehicles below.  

Fundraising

Raising funds for a project or collective? Need some advice on how to corral support and communicate with the AfrikaBurn community? That’s below. 

Press

Got a camera? Want to take photos for your glossy magazine? Want to let the whole world know about the wonders of Tankwa Town? Let us know.

Decommodification

Tankwa Town is a decommodified space. That means no money, no advertising, no marketing, no sales, and only gifts. It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

Image credit: David Gwynne Evans

Preparation

If there’s one thing you need to be for AfrikaBurn, it’s prepared. That’s why there’s a whole wiki to help you get skilled up enough to attend. It’s not going to be easy, and it might not even be fun, but it will be worth it. 

Past Event Gallery

Leave no trace

The Tankwa Karoo is a special place and deserves to be respected. The best way you can show your respect is by ensuring that you become conscious of your impact through litter. But MOOP isn’t just litter – it’s anything that does not belong: it’s Matter Out Of Place.

Over the years Tankwa Town has grown, and with it the number of citizens – and also the amount of time spent restoring our event site to the condition we found it. To do this, volunteers spend weeks after you’ve left – weeks – picking up every last scrap of evidence that Tankwa Town was even there at all. In case you thought it might consist of a holiday in the sun, here’s the reality: volunteers on our Leave No Trace team, and from DPW, walk every. single. inch. of our event site. They form a line, and perform linesweeps, covering every single tiny scrap of the surface in order to identify items that don’t belong.

It’s back-breaking work. Imagine bending over thousands of times, in the baking 40+ sun, and in the teeth of hectic Tankwa gales – day after day – picking up tiny items and depositing them into a container (our LNT crew uses 5-litre water bottles, which are plentiful after the event). You start early, finish at sundown – and then repeat it, day after day, until the entire event site has been completely restored. That’s what it consists of.

This is a short list of some of the kind of MOOPed kak that LNT volunteers find:

Cigarette butts. Glowstick connectors. Matches. Bottle caps. String. Bedazzlers. Bindis. Glitter. Toilet paper. Napkins. Shells. Nuts. Straw. Cableties. Wood. Splinters. Nails. Screws. Polystyrene (from split bean bags). Peach pips. Bamboo. Orange peels. Naartjie peels. Lemon rind. Beads. Plastic flowers. Batteries. Broken LED’s. Finger lights. Feather boa scraps. Food scraps. Rice grains. Muesli. Pasta. Broken glass. Duct tape. Electrical insulation tape. Straw. Mirror ball fragments. Cigarette packets. Tampons. Condoms. Sequins. Flase eyelashes. Lighters.

Everyone that attends AfrikaBurn needs to make sure that they treat the land with the utmost respect by being MOOP aware. If you feel strongly about MOOP, it would be great if you volunteered to help make AfrikaBurn as MOOP-free as possible.

Please note that each camp will be required to manage their waste correctly and ensure that it is taken back to where it came from. This means you should nominate someone who likes organising – as the key role of a camp MOOP representative will be to co-ordinate how your camp separates and recycles its waste, and makes sure no pesky small items (or large for that matter) are left behind once you hit the long road home.

It’s a long road, it’s true, but no matter what happens, it’s not OK to abandon trash on the side of the road, or dump greywater or RV / campervan toilet bilge on the side of the road. All of these MOOP actions cause major problems with AfrikaBurn’s relations with the local community in the area. Please don’t do it – and don’t let anyone else think it’s OK.

Like to read more about how you can organise your camp’s waste? Read this great article on our blog.

Got Leave No Trace or MOOP questions? Interested in volunteering to keep Tankwa Town pristine? Shoot a mail at [email protected]