AfrikaBurn '26
My very first burn. What a week in the desert taught me about love, ego, impermanence and what we owe each other.
There is no clean way into the dust or this article. AfrikaBurn does not lend itself to neat beginnings or endings. It has been over a week and I am still downloading, still piecing together memories that surface at different times, still trying to make sense of it all in a mind that feels wholly inadequate for the scale of what I witnessed and experienced. What I can tell you is; witnessing what human beings are capable of when we choose to show up for one another, made me feel more connected to humanity than I have in a very long time. Through that connection I felt grounded. And through that grounding, genuine humility. What a privilege and an honour it was to experience my first AfrikaBurn.
We carry this capacity with us always. The burn just makes it visible.
We arrived on Tuesday, tired before we even got there. Weeks of preparation, and then the dust, and then the magic began. In the days that followed we gave it our all—thousands of steps, very little sleep, so much to absorb, for us all, all the time. The full moon glimmering from the shadows. And then Friday night came and the moon reached its peak and released. I saw a burn in the distance and walked toward it alone. I looked around and saw kids and families, characters on stilts, fire dancers, music drifting across the landscape, and those extraordinary mutant vehicles. I was blown away by what people had created—for themselves, yes, but mostly for the rest of us. For the ones witnessing it. People so enamoured with what they were seeing and experiencing, so alive in that moment. Many of them had spent months, some of them years, preparing. All of that time, energy, craft and love finally being expressed and experienced. Seeing people so alive in their joy delighted me. The way the world is right now, to witness a moment like that, felt like a blessing.
As I continued to explore under the full moon, I came across a piece of artwork—a spiral, rainbow coloured, rope twisted through it, LED lights running around it, shaped like a wide open shell—and I started crying. I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t only the artwork. It was everything the space had been holding for me, things I thought I had already moved through, processed, and left behind. And there they were, waiting patiently to be acknowledged. What followed was a deep gut-wrenching release, and within it: acceptance, tenderness, sorrow, pain, joy and overwhelm. An overwhelming appreciation for where I was, what I was taking in, for being alive, and for being open enough to experience it. In that moment I felt the full weight of what was being offered; by the artists, builders, volunteers, givers and creators, for others to hold and behold. What a privilege it was to witness life in this way.
The burns. They were the power, the heart, the soul of this entire experience. To watch something built with such care and craftsmanship—and to know it was always going to be burned. That it was built to be destroyed. I feel so many overwhelming emotions for the people who made that choice. I still do—even writing this now. They taught me that love can exist without it needing to last. That not everything is meant to live forever. That there is a freedom in that, a trust and a release all at once. That everything is okay and will be okay, even after it is gone.
What I experienced was mine entirely—and so within that, I also came away with observations of the space and those within it, and I want to share them honestly and with reverence.
What I observed felt like two distinctive energies. The first is what I believe this event is built on—love in its highest form. Gifting not just in the literal sense but in warmth, wisdom, creativity, presence and physical effort. Those who showed up to give, who held the space with care, who understood what it truly meant to be there and remain present in all of the awe that surrounded them. And I want to name the volunteers here specifically—because AfrikaBurn runs entirely on volunteer effort. Every moment of safety, organisation and care that allowed the rest of us to be fully present was held together by people who chose to give their time and energy without recognition or return. For me, this energy felt most authentic to what AfrikaBurn embodies.
The second felt more extractive. Moving through the land, the spaces and through each other asking, consciously or not, what can you give me? A performativeness of individualism, seeking validation externally—and I say that with compassion, because I understand the humanness of self-performance. We live in a world that demands us to constantly perform, to seek approval from outside ourselves, and that energy can come with us into the very spaces that exist for us to put it down. AfrikaBurn is one of those spaces.
The question I kept coming back to is: how do we know the difference between showing up for external validation and showing up from somewhere honest within ourselves? How do we know when it is the ego arriving and when it is the heart? And how do we create the conditions where people feel safe enough to choose the latter?
AfrikaBurn is not, at its core, a party. It is so much more than that—and the music and the dancing are one beautiful expression of what it offers, but they are not the whole of it. There is a guide, a programme so vast and so carefully curated that you could plan your entire week and still not come close to experiencing everything on offer. Every performance, every camp, every offering is deliberate—prepared with intention by people who gave enormously to make it possible. The desert has a way of guiding you too, if you let it. You follow what you are pulled toward, and sometimes the most profound moments are the ones you stumble across along your way. One evening, while making our way back to the tent, we passed a camp where a dance performance was taking place, a painter working behind the dancers, all of them building something together in real time. It was magnificent. That is AfrikaBurn at its most alive—unparalleled moments of human expression.
My blister are proof of me dancing my little feet off. The music moved through me and I flowed like a river with the energy of the crowd as we were entranced by rhythm and bass. We moved in unison and it was magical. That is what music can do. But I feel quite strongly that the intention set by each DJ matters greatly—maybe I’m stating the obvious, but I felt this—substantially— for the first time at AfrikaBurn. It always comes back to the same thing: heart or ego. The DJs who played from one and the DJs who played from the other created entirely different worlds. When you give from the heart it is received by the heart of another—and to be in the presence of that kind of authentic expression is a gift. Others felt more self-involved, the energy more hedonistic, and for me it didn’t feel in harmony with the rest of the burn. And that intention travels. It moves through those of us on the dance-floor and forms what is created there—in those settings I felt people were less considerate of those around them. I noticed more pushing and bumping, items being trampled, little to no awareness of those nearby. The individual self became the priority.
And this is what I keep returning to—intention. Not just in the music, but in everything. In how we move through a space, in how we engage with what is being offered, in how we show up for one another. What is the intention behind what you are expressing? How are you integrating with what is around you, what is being shared, what is happening? Because AfrikaBurn holds a mirror up to all of it.
The quality of your presence shapes the quality of your experience—and ripples out to those around you.
My attunement with AfrikaBurn took time, it didn’t happen the minute I set foot in the dust and made my dust fairy. Those first few days gave me a moment to catch my breath, to take in where I was, to solidify my intention and my appreciation. And I think without enough of that time at the beginning of your AfrikaBurn journey, it is harder to arrive at that place of oneness and harmony within the environment—which may be why people feel the energy shifts towards the end of the week.
And I think about preparation—and I think it is one of the most important conversations we can have. The information exists. The principles, the guidebooks, the contributor posts, the website. There is so much to engage with if we choose to. But not everyone has the framework to know what they are preparing for, or the awareness to know that preparation is even needed. We do not all arrive at the same place of inner readiness. I think more needs to be done to guide people into the experience before they arrive—not to prescribe how anyone should show up, but to offer them the opportunity to go inward first. To reflect on what they are bringing and what they are open to. To create the conditions in themselves that allow the space to do what it is capable of doing. Because without that, the integrity of what AfrikaBurn is becomes harder to hold, and harder to maintain. How do we create a moment of real contact with what this is before we set foot on the dust? What does it mean to enter a space like this? What does it mean to give? What does it mean to be in community with the land, with those you are yet to know, and with yourself?
Sadly I was disappointed by the lack of friendliness between people—even just a simple hello from a passerby was hard to come by. Many of my greetings and acknowledgements were met with silence. I know we all arrive carrying different things, in different states, in our own worlds. But I also felt how much was possible when an opening did happen, even briefly, even just in the form of a smile or a nod. Connection does not ask for much, but it has so much potential power when it is met.
How do we invite each other more fully into our own intentionality? How do we honour the privilege of being part of something this sacred? How do we recognise that every small act of attention, every detail, every moment of care—that this is the magic?
“Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, ‘you owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that—it lights the whole sky.” — Hafiz
And here I sit on my bed holding an experience that feels like it belongs to the most fortunate people on earth—and somehow, this time, I was one of them. To say my heart is overflowing does not begin to touch the transformative nature of what this week has given me. Because I saw what we are capable of. I saw what people build for one another, what they give, what they pour into the world out of pure love. And it hurts to hold that alongside the knowledge of how much pain still exists outside of it—how much still needs to be healed, how much still needs to be held.
Two worlds, both real, one showing what the other could be. AfrikaBurn is not an escape from the world—it is another expression of it. And I left thinking about how transformative it would be if even a fraction of what is felt and given in that space could be carried into the world we share every day. We have the tools. We always have. The burn just makes it visible.
— Colleen E Murray
You have a wonderful way with words xx