The resourceful, imaginative, adventurous individuals who contribute to the annual AfrikaBurn community in the heart of the Karoo make a space for the unexpected.
AfrikaBurn offers a glimpse into a way of being that challenges our consumerist, meritocratic, technology-addicted world. Gifting is a core principle: everything at AfrikaBurn is freely given and freely received.
When Rod Bracher inherited a collection of stamps from his philatelist grandmother in 2007, he invested them in Burning Mail, the AfrikaBurn postal service - and the art of postcard writing was re-imagined.
Postcards appeared in SA in the late 1880s. With the "gold rush" in the early 1900s, vast quantities of postcards were produced and mailed to home countries from the "City of Gold" with reassuring messages to families and friends. Decades later, technology has redefined the way we communicate with one another.
"Society has lost touch with the art of letter and postcard writing," founder member Anine Trümpelmann says.
This year, 42 uniformed "Billies" from around the world volunteered to navigate the heat and dust of the Tankwa desert to deliver and collect mail.
"Twelve thousand people with no cell connection want to communicate," Casper Oelofsen says. "Hi Peter, see you at 10h00 tomorrow at the Champagne Tent." "It may take 10 minutes or half a day, but we have a 99% chance of finding Peter."
The Burning Mail van is the postal service's satellite office in the desert, Anine says. But most deliveries are by foot or on bicycles. Addresses are unique, Marisa Bracher explains: "The blue nomad tent with white prayer flags, by the old Land Rover, on the corner of 6'ish and Archeclan."
In a dramatic closing event, postcards to the Universe are burnt in a Temple Burn. "This offers people a space and opportunity to let go, to release, to get closure," Marisa says.
Leaving no trace is an AfrikaBurn principle: when nothing but the desert remains, postcards are taken to Cape Town and mailed to destinations across the globe. This year, 3,562 postcards were sent to 67 countries.
Louietta du Toit chose to mail a postcard to herself in 2016. "My life was in transition. I had left my job and was unsure of my future when I went to AfrikaBurn with people I barely knew. I was terrified; I felt out of my depth and I wasn't sure how I would cope. And then - it's hard to describe the entirety of it - at some point I dipped into the experience and became part of it. Thoughts around who I was and where I belonged faded into the background; I released my anxious, controlling grip. When I wrote the message to myself on the postcard - 'Don't forget' - my intention was to try to transport that mindset into after AfrikaBurn.
"When I received the postcard three months later, the memory was visceral: the sensations and the smells around me, the temperature, the pulse of the people, and that experience of being present and of being in a space of flow and joy. The postcard image is the design of that particular year, so it is very much rooted in the time. If I had to picture myself looking at that image 50 years from now, what it would trigger for me is all the principles around the event and the way that I personally experienced them."
"Why postcards are so interesting is that they are a snapshot of where you are and a relic of that place. They are an artifact of that moment," says James Findlay, founder of Collectable Books and Antique Maps at the historic Rand Club.
Owner of The Old Limpopo Curiosity Shop, Mark Inman, tells me there is more interest in postcards than ever before. "You have only got to track the auction rooms to see the values of postcards and photographs over the past 10 years - they are just going up and up and up because of demand . They are the new asset classes within the printed field."
Collectors look for images, stamps, dates, and historical context - not literary quality. But postcards may also be a form of minimalist eloquence, or give heart-rending insight into an individual's life.
"I think they are a minimalist art form," Du Toit says. " It's very concrete and personal."
Will AfrikaBurn postcards be valuable in 100 years' time?
Imagine a collector rummaging through a dilapidated box of ephemera and coming across a postcard with an AfrikaBurn image on it and a message: "Remember this!" Perhaps it will be a reminder of a liminal community that came together in the desert, in a town named Tankwa in the Karoo, and tried to live out the AfrikaBurn principles: radical inclusion; gifting; de-commodification; radical self-reliance, radical self-expression; communal effort; civic responsibility; leaving no trace; participation; immediacy, and each one teach one!
• Du Toit framed her postcard and wrote a blog post about her experience. Read it here.
