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. 

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. 

Bushfire has taken a traditional music festival model and turned it into a movement for local and regional social change founded on concrete and specific localized activations.

Harnessing the power of the arts, the reach of celebrities and artists, and the passion ignited by music and social gatherings, Bushfire drives a specific agenda that supports the most marginalized and disempowered communities in the region.

The commercial model of a music festival is now a platform for social, environmental, and community organizations to promote and showcase their work in the Bring Your Fire Zone. A music festival is a space where thousands of young people learn to find and activate their own creative voices on issues affecting them through the annual Schools Festival. The festival is a now a space where emerging local artists can learn best practice and connect to their international counterparts through the Arts Round Table.

A music festival is now a way to support beneficiary organizations, such as BoMake Rural projects who produce and profit from all festival merchandise sold.

Bushfire has innovated on the traditional music festival to transform it into a movement and a message – to create, not just a physical event in space and time, but rather a sustainable model for real community engagement and development. 

Bushfire, through its various initiatives impacts a diverse and extensive range of people, primarily but not only in Eswatini.

As a music event, the annual festival attracts over 15,000 people who, in addition to supporting regional and local artists through their attendance, also have the opportunity to engage with our community and organizational partners in the Bring Your Fire Zone, as well as having a portion of their ticket price being donated to local beneficiaries.

The Bring Your Fire Zone where all our community and development partners activate sees at least 15,000 attendees annually, with a total in 5 years of over 70,000.

As a festival event, the local Eswatini economy is also massively impated in a positive way as the   festival  brings in tourists and revenue for local businesses. The event also generates about US$6 Million in PR value through print, online and broadcast media, and thus engaging hundreds of thousands of people.  The festival has over 30 000 admissions each year from over 50 countries.

However, Bushfire is more than the music and arts festival. Our other key interventions impact thousands of people across Eswatini, with a focus on marginalized communities and the creative sectors.

•  The Bushfire Schools’ Festival has about 1 500 students and 60 teachers participate over the 4 days each year. Over the next 5 years, we aim to increase the number of students and teachers that we reach as well as have a  more impactful engagement with them by having quarterly workshops. The initial pilot project will have 5 schools with each school having 100 students and 10 teachers ,which will grow the numbers to 1900 students and 100 teachers per year. Over five years this expanded project will see at least 8,000 participants.

•   The Arts Round Table  has 100 artists each year and we plan on having 3 more sessions each year which will grow the numbers to 400 artists per year. Within 5 years this will see approximately 2000 local creatives impacted.

The main challenge that the project faces is  to continue funding the specific initiatives that are not revenue generating initiatives in themselves.   These include the Arts Round Table and Schools Festival. These are the initiatives that have the most direct impact on local communities, however they do not have their own built-in revenue streams.

With increased funding we would be able to have dedicated staff for each initiative enabling more participants as well as a better caliber of facilitators. The main reasons for the limited funding being that there are very few organizations in Eswatini able to fund CSI projects and all of our fundraising has to be done internationally. 

In order to overcome this challenge, we aim to solicit more international strategic partnerships. With this new international focus, we aim to increase the number of partners as well as have partners who have the resources to support such projects. This requires that we research and engage organizations that have similar objectives and also improve our online communication channels.

At the moment we work with partners on specific initiatives.

For the Bushfire Schools Festival, we have the following partners that assist with funding;

•            MTN Foundation

•            European Union

•            Parmalat

In the Bring your fire zone, we have the following partners who are mostly activation partners, meaning they set up environments within the festival whereby the engage festival attendees on the various festival pillars;

•            STEM Education

•            Peace Corps

•            UNFPA

•            AIDS Health Foundation

•            COSPE-Cooperation for the Development of Emerging Countries

•            Rock of Hope

•            UNDP

•            Save The Children

•            Moya Centre

The Arts Round Table had the following partners, who supported the costs of bringing facilitators to the workshops.

•            Goethe Institut

•            IGODA

Bushfire's business model is a hybrid format whereby the organization generates revenue through ticket sales and sponsorships, as well as collaborations with strategic partners to fund its projects. Funding for the Bring Your Fire project comes primarily from ticket sales from the MTN Bushfire festival and through sponsorships. These funds are then used to support our social activism mandate. 

Additionally, a portion of ticket sales goes directly to support one of our festival beneficiaries, Young Heroes. Another of the festival's beneficiaries, boMake Rural Projects, receives all the proceeds from festival merchandise sales.To date, our beneficiaries have received over Us$200 000 directly from the festival.

Young Heroes provides relief services to the orphans through cash transfers (Life Support Grants) and has since expanded to the NGO’s vocational skills training empowerment program, healthcare, HIV prevention, and projects sustaining OVC at Neighborhood Care Points (NCP).

boMake Rural Projects empowers women to build resilient families in thriving communities through community-led Education, Health and Sustainable Livelihoods programs.

In terms of our main source of revenue, ticket sales, Bushfire has sold out for the last 6 consecutive years. It is important for us to remain relevant as a festival in order to ensure this revenue stream remains strong. 

However, ticket sales are not enough to support our social activism projects in the long term, so it is imperative that we continually source new sponsors and partners for these initiatives to remain sustainable. It is also important to retain our mutually beneficial relationships with our existing partners by ensuring that we can maintain our contractual deliverables. 

The path to financial sustainability is through a better balance of revenue streams that don't rely too heavily on festival ticket sales. There is a need to  increase revenue received through sponsorships by entering into long term relationships that can guarantee funding in advance. 

The main way the project raises funds is through ticket sales and sponsorship. When people purchase Bushfire festival tickets, a portion of that revenue is allocated to the Bring Your Fire projects and we also have sponsors that fund the various initiatives directly Ticket sales account approximately for two-thirds of our revenue and sponsorship accounts for a third.

Our main partners and sponsors that we receive support from are: MTN Eswatini (our festival title sponsor), Total, First National Bank and the European Union.

As the Bring Your Fire project is not revenue generating project , it therefore primarily relies on sponsorships to function. There are two kinds of sponsorships that the project receives and that is in-kind and cash sponsorships. The in-kind sponsorship usually includes program support through supporting artist/facilitator fees, transport and accommodation. In terms of cash sponsorships, the target is to raise funds and in return offer sponsors sales, marketing and hospitality deliverables.

The reason we are applying for the elevate prize is to help sustain and grow the impact of our Bring Your Fire projects. This is usually difficult to do as most organizations prefer to fund activities that have a revenue based ROI model instead of a CSR driven one. The elevate prize seems to embrace the importance of supporting projects that are not financially driven but which aim to improve our communities.

We seek partners that can support through financial means to help fund our projects but we are also looking to create partnerships with organizations that can offer expertise in environmental sustainability, arts in education, arts development and gender equality and inclusiveness. We are also interested in amplifying our messaging and therefore are also looking for partners that can help improve our communications and marketing for our projects.