A Year In
We took ownership of the property almost exactly a year ago, and I sat down with Robert to ask him the obvious question: what moves him now, after the papers were signed and the dust of two years of searching finally settled. His answer wasn’t a tidy one. It circled back, as he often does, to everything that had to happen first. “Nothing just falls into your hands just by design or grace,” he told me. “It has to be worked for.”
Before South Africa there was Spain: two years of looking at properties that were almost right but never quite. Then, as Robert tells it, the decision to try South Africa instead was made “spontaneously, over a glass of wine,” because it was the place of his birth. What followed was another two years of searching before they closed the deal on 21.3 hectares at the top of Wilderness, a piece of land that catches both the sunrise and the sunset. “It is an opportunity of a lifetime,” he said. “Let me tell you that. It is an opportunity of a lifetime.”
What It Cost
None of this came free, and Robert doesn’t pretend it did. For long stretches he was here on the farm while Stephie was still in Switzerland finishing her work, the two of them running a marriage long distance. When I asked how that felt, he didn’t dodge it. “There is pains,” he said, “but we must remember everything that’s good, everything that’s hardened for the future is to be forged in fire. So nothing is without sacrifice. You have to sacrifice to achieve your goals. You have to sacrifice time, money, your relationships to a certain extent.” And then the line that stayed with me afterward: “If things were just given to us, it would just fall into our hands. And if things were so easy, it would diminish in the essence its value.”
Giving Back
The part of Robert’s thinking that surprised me least, because I’ve watched it build for a while now, is where his attention turns once the farm itself is accounted for: to the Wilderness Heights community next door, about 600 people living. Farm21 has taken on an NPO role there, through the Wilderness Heights Community Project, and Robert is clear about why it matters to him personally. “I think giving back is an important process,” he said, “because that just makes us a little bit more humble, that we know that we’ve only got a limited amount of time that we can spend here in life.” He wants the organization to do more than hand out jobs, though that’s part of it too: “a place for small kids to have a place to go, sports facilities, education facilities, training facilities to be able to give them also a brighter future.”
Five Years Out
I asked him to paint the picture five years from now, and he was careful not to overpromise. “You can’t make promises you can’t keep,” he said, “but I think we have a real possibility of changing lives, and I think we already have changed a couple of lives.” The picture he painted was specific: a thriving Wilderness Heights with “their own local economy, where they can have perhaps their own coffee shops, where they can have their own local commercialism, whether it be trades, whether it be craftsmen, whether it be their own overnight stay accommodations.” He called it Ubuntu, the idea that people “are not of an ability that cannot make what is necessary to be able to sustain themselves,” that given the chance they can “flourish and provide their own communities not only infrastructure, but a certain future.”
Coming Home
Robert has changed continents seven times. I asked him what it feels like now, after all that moving, to be somewhere that might actually be the last stop. He told me someone had once said to him: “you were born with that red sand underneath your feet, you’ll die with that red sand underneath your feet,” and for a long time he hadn’t believed it. Each move, he said, taught him something he thought he’d never need again, until he needed it. “A large amount of tools in my toolbox, which I can now use for a very, very good purpose.” As for how it feels to be back: “This definitely feels right. I think if you look at the global situation, it doesn’t feel that I’m moving away from something. It definitely feels like going towards something, and there’s something has got value and has got importance.” He paused, then added, simply: “I have definitely arrived back home.”
