Bring Your Fire
Jiggs Thorne is performance poet, artist, and visionary arts and festival director with a strong pedigree in creating, developing, and promoting African arts and culture. Jiggs is the founder and Director of House on Fire, the MTN Bushfire Festival, and the Standard Bank Luju Food and Lifestyle Festival, as well as the founder of IGODA, a Southern African Music Festival Circuit. Through his diverse creative work, and as a leading arts practitioner, Jiggs has had a major impact on the artistic landscape of the Southern African region and beyond.
Bushfire addresses the need to empower voiceless and marginalized communities in Southern Africa. Due to poverty, lack of access to resources, and often due to stigmatization and discrimination, many individuals and communities are unable to improve their circumstances or make their voices heard.
The project includes a number of initiatives that enable agency for those often on the margins, such as youth, women, and LGBTQI communities. With a focus on sustainability, tolerance, and inclusion, the project includes the Bushfire festival, a three-day music and arts festival, the Bring Your Fire Zone, the Arts Round Table, and the Schools Festival.
Bushfire elevates not just individuals, but entire communities both by empowering them to find and raise their own voices, and by providing platforms for those voices to be heard, acknowledged, and recognized on a local, regional and global scale.
Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) is a developing country with limited resources, and has major problems including inequality, poverty, and a lack of access to resources. Due to various factors, specific communities suffer more than others, most notably women, LGBTQI, and the youth.
These communities often suffer from a double burden; that of poverty and stigmatization. It is extremely difficult for communities or individuals to articulate and activate for their own needs; from reproductive health and gender equality to food security or sustainable environments.
Arts and creative expression are powerful tools with which to address these issues at the source by enabling individuals within communities to find new ways to vocalize and address the issues affecting them.
Over half of the population is under the age of 25*. An important aspect of our project is to give hope to the youth, exposure to diverse opinions, and to networks and platforms that enable activism and change, in order to encourage them to come up with their own creative solutions to burning social and environmental issues.
*According to https://www.indexmundi.com/swaziland/demographics_profile.html
Bushfire’s Bring Your Fire project empowers the agency of marginalized individuals and communities by literally enabling them to find their voices through creativity. Hinged around a three-day celebration of inclusiveness and diversity, Bushfire outreach activations such as the Schools Festival have enabled thousands of young people in Eswatini to engage in often taboo subjects - such as gender and sexuality, reproductive health, and domestic violence - through drama, poetry, song, and dance.
These projects, such as the Green Round Table which brings together young people to engage around practical and constructive environmental issues, are often the first time that young people find their own voices, and raise them in a context where their ideas are heard, valued, and even acted on.
Similarly, the project’s Bring Your Fire Zone at the annual festival is one of the few spaces where organizations focusing on marginalized issues and communities can openly promote and share their work, network, and find supporters and allies.
Bushfire’s commitment to positive social and environmental action resulted in the winning of the ‘Best Responsible Event’ at the African Responsible Tourism Awards, 2017.
The main communities that Bushfire engages with are youth and women, with a focus on community-based organizations, all done in partnership with Eswatini’s creative sector. In order for our work to be truly inclusive and effective, Bushfire builds bridges between the creative industries, communities in need, and broader local and regional economic and cultural sectors.
These bridges enable increased access to opportunity, as well as enable the expansion of creative expression that drives economic growth, battles inequality, and promotes individual agency and empowerment.
All our initiatives are powered though partnerships with existing community organizations. For example, our engagement with the creative sector, through the Arts Round Table, is driven by a range of local arts fraternity representatives, and industry professionals that, as a collective, identify the challenges and needs that exist for local arts development. The project then connects these arts practitioners with government, tourism, and community partners.
Marginalized communities such as youth-led households, rural women, LGBTQI, and others are also brought in to ensure their voices are developed and amplified within the conversation. Often, Bushfire initiatives are the only platforms that some of these communities have to express their concerns and drive their agendas for change.
- Elevating issues and their projects by building awareness and driving action to solve the most difficult problems of our world
The Bring Your Fire project is a project to uplift others, particularly the youth in Eswatini, by providing them with experiences they may never otherwise have, exposure to different ways of thinking, and the opportunity to engage with important social issues that impact them in a safe space.
Ultimately, the problems of our society require constant engagement, significant behavior change, and creative thinking to solve. Importantly, the youth are our future and I believe we should equip them as well as possible so that they can find their own credible solutions to the problems they will face in their lives.
The Bushfire festival developed out of a personal vision driven by a passion for local arts, music, and culture. In 2000, I founded House On Fire, an Afro-Shakespearean amphitheater located on our farm in Eswatini’s Ezulwini valley. The space is a continuously evolving architectural fantasy-scape, depicting symbols and icons from around the world which highlight the ideology of harmony in contrast.
Seven years later, I felt that we could expand and grow our creative offering and so Bushfire, our flagship festival event, was born. From its inception Bushfire was about manifesting a platform for conscious creative expression. Over the years, creative curation and social action became inextricably linked as local partners and communities joined with us to create more and more engagements based on local needs.
The objective was always to use the creative and immersive platform of the arts to encourage and support a space for pro-active expression for positive social change. A purpose-driven event infused with the spirit and magic that surrounds positive intent!
Creating a sustainable creative venture at the bottom of the garden on our farm in central Eswatini, with hindsight, was always going to be a longshot. When we started excavating everyone thought we were building a swimming pool. The hole hewn into the red earth was in actual fact the beginning of the House On Fire Amphitheatre, later to become a leading cultural space in the region and the heart of Bushfire, a celebrated international festival many years later.
I have always been deeply driven by an innate sense of my creative ability, a driving force that I had to patiently allow to uncoil. Once I had started to find my own voice as an artist, I knew I had to create a space that would support my process and allow others to do the same. At a time when there were very few creative platforms in Swaziland, I was resolute in pursuit of this dream and the gratifying outcome has been that, over the years, numerous other local Swazi artists have benefitted from this vision, inspiring the wonderful emergence of a local creative narrative which expresses who we are and where we are.
Over the years, I have developed and learned the hard way to appreciate all the components that must come together in order to drive a project that is both commercially viable and yet also always driven by our mandate for development and social change.
Through this process I’ve been able to develop our capacity and structures as an organization. I’ve learnt financial management, careful budgeting, and risk management.
I’ve had some great mentors and, through access to regional and international creative networks, I’ve learned that we have to come up with home-grown solutions and that the solutions have to fit the context of our locale. Bushfire, as a festival event, has played a major role in developing the local creative industry, as well as in supporting regional festival growth and artistic expression.
As a creative practitioner, a festival director, an activist for social change, and now as someone who has led a successful Bushfire project for over a decade, I have developed leadership skills and the ability to develop, maintain, and groom a solid, creative, innovative team of young professionals in the arts industry.
My ability to network locally, regionally and globally, and also through creating further networking opportunities for others such as the Arts Round Table, has validated my belief in the arts as an agent for social change.
I started off as a charity running a business, and I quickly realized we needed to be a business running a charity for it to be sustainable. When I started the project, the social mandate was our driving force and believed that giving away 100% of profits was the right model. However, I soon realized this was not viable and that true social change would not come through a short-lived unsustainable event.
I had to embark on a painful process of reevaluating the way in which we approached the festival. I needed to set up structures and systems that catered for financial management, enabling us to sustain ourselves between the events, to manage staff and budgets, and ultimately, to be financially accountable without compromising our creative and social vision. I had no formal training in this space but it was something I had to learn quickly in order to remain afloat and continue to engage with our local communities.
We learned how to be both commercially viable in a way that still lives and breathes our social and creative mandate. We created multiple revenue streams from sponsorship to ticket sales, while ensuring we had partners who shared a similar vision.
Most recently, my leadership ability was put to one of the hardest tests of the past 14 years, with the arrival of Covid-19. Early on, before the government had begun to implement a response, I realized that, as a leading event in the region, Bushfire needed to take a stand. One of the most difficult decisions I had to take was to postpone the festival two months before it was due to go live - to 2021 – effectively taking millions of dollars out of the national economy.
In many ways, Bushfire set the precedent for large-scale events, making an official decision to put health and safety within Eswatini and the region first.
The impact of this decision was massive and far-reaching, but our open, honest, and consultative approach to the decision-making process ensured that all of our partners – government and private, our beneficiaries, artists, activation partners and guests felt that it was the right call.
The effect on our organization has been devastating, and as a leader I have had to hold together a team that has suffered massive financial loss, partly due to a reluctance on the part of sponsors to meet contractual obligations.
- Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit
Director