It’s that time of year when a truckload of companies are trying to sell you a truckload of things because you’re going to be going to AfrikaBurn …
Burn Markets, Burn Offers, Burn Rentals, Burn Flights, Burn your bum for 10% off, Burn your bra and get a free ticket. We estimate that AfrikaBurn adds about R150M into the local economy, so it’s not surprising that lots of businesses want a piece of that juicy pie. But what that pie is made of, who made it, and whose Ouma’s recipe it is, is very important to our community.
At AfrikaBurn, we love local, we love ethical, we love supporting the little guy. But if that little guy is taking advantage of our community’s creativity and intellectual property to sell you something in the default world, then it goes against our community ethos, and risks turning the gift of many into the profit of few. It would be so much easier if we just licensed AfrikaBurn™©, charging companies a fee, so you can get AfrikaBurn-branded water delivered to your camp, but we have strong guiding principles, one of which is ‘decommodification’, which is a big part of what makes AfrikaBurn the event and the community it is and not your average festival. AfrikaBurn is not all about the art and the fire that we build together; it’s about our culture.
99% of the people online using ‘AfrikaBurn’ or ‘Burn’ to sell you stuff have never even been to AfrikaBurn. We can tell this because the stuff they’re trying to sell you also doesn’t align with our principles … It’s either covered in sequins and feathers or has been made in a questionable way. People will swear to you that their feathers and sequins have been glued on by the freshwater bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, but as anyone who’s done a moop-swoop will tell you, that stuff ain’t so sticky in Tankwa Town.
Just in case you’ve not read it in a while, the decommodification principle reads:
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
How can you help to protect our culture? Simple. Each One Teach One … politely let the people and companies who exploit our culture know that you don’t like them doing so. Send them a friendly DM as a concerned community member, comment on their social posts, and let them know you won’t be giving them any money until they change tack. Send us a message at info@afrikaburn.com so we can keep an eye on things… It’s easy for culture pirates to ignore an individual or an organisation; it’s very hard to ignore a whole community.
