Between making peace with decline and packing for the airport, there is a third option — and it can be built.

Spend enough evenings around a braai, or enough late hours at the kitchen table, and the conversation finds its way to the same question: what are we going to do about the future? The answers almost always fall into two camps.

The first is a quiet resignation. Ons sal regkom. We will cope, adapt, lower our expectations a notch at a time, lock the gate a little earlier, and make do. The second is a passport — a one-way ticket to the UK, New Zealand, the Netherlands, wherever the visa finally comes through. A new language for the children, colder winters, and a homesickness that arrives long before the plane has landed.

I am not neutral on this. For the past few years my life has straddled the question — I run a business in both Germany and South Africa, and move constantly between the two — and I have watched many capable, decent people work through exactly this choice. Both answers are honest, and both give up something that matters far too much. Resign yourself, and you keep the land and the language but quietly hand your children a smaller life. Leave, and you may secure their prospects — but you trade away the community and the country that shaped you, and feel that loss for the rest of your life.

What I want to put on the table is a third answer.

The option nobody names

The third way is harder to see than the other two. It does not yet exist at any real scale in South Africa, so there is nothing to drive out to and look at — and building it asks for the kind of patient, hands-on work that many people have quietly concluded is no longer realistic.

It is this. Instead of resigning, and instead of leaving, you build — small, deliberate, largely self-sufficient settlements, eco-villages, where a handful of households live well, productively and in real community, on land and on terms they had a hand in designing.

Let me be precise about what I do not mean. Not a commune, with every income tipped into one pot. Not a security estate with solar panels screwed to the roofs. And certainly not a laager — a ring of wagons turned inward against the world. An eco-village is the opposite of a defensive crouch: a constructive project, organised around shared land, shared infrastructure, and a working culture of self-reliance, craftsmanship and plain ecological sense.

It draws on Afrikaans culture and language straightforwardly — as a matter of fact, not as a flag. If the people who build it speak Afrikaans, make potjie on a Sunday and raise their children in the language, that is simply what the place will feel like. But it is not built on keeping anyone out. It is open to anyone aligned with the values beneath it: ecological, self-reliant, quietly communal, more interested in making things than in lamenting them. Honestly rooted, and honestly open — the two are not in conflict.

Why a village, and not something simpler

Why a village specifically — why not a smallholding, a security estate, or a quiet country town? Because each, looked at squarely, misses something a village provides directly.

Take the smallholding. The romance is real — your own gate, your own few hectares — but one household alone is not a community, and it inherits an enormous workload. Water, power, food, security, maintenance, schooling, the care of ageing parents: all of it lands on two adults. Most people end up living much as before, only further from town, still wired into the same brittle systems they hoped to leave.

The security estate fails differently: it is simply the wrong shape. Estates are built to protect property values and keep the outside out, not for people to produce anything together. Residents share a perimeter wall and a guardhouse, and little else — no borehole, no workshop, no harvest.

The country town is pleasant enough — but you move into a place already shaped by other hands. You inherit its assumptions, its infrastructure and often its slow decline, and you do not get to decide how it makes its power, teaches its children, or runs its shared life.

An eco-village answers all three at once. It is small enough that everyone is known by name, yet structured enough that the daily load is shared rather than crushing. Planned from a blank page, the essentials — water, energy, food, how decisions get made — are designed in from the first sketch, not patched on later. And with a sensible structure, the cost of joining sits well below the price of a smallholding, within reach of ordinary families.

What it could look like

An idea like this only becomes real in the detail. Picture a deliberately small community — a handful of households, fewer than ten people in the founding phase — on a property of under three hectares. Small on purpose: the first village is a proof of concept, meant to be documented and copied. I have sketched the physical layout separately; here are the parts that matter most.

Land. I do not own a site for this yet, so let me describe what to look for. An eco-village does not need farm-sized land — it needs the right small piece. Water is the deciding question: a borehole that genuinely delivers, ideally a stream as well. A gentle fall across the land earns its keep, moving water by gravity rather than by pump. You want open sky and good orientation for solar, and the vegetation already growing there will tell you whether the soil is alive. Do not over-prize remoteness: being within an hour of a city buys you fibre, a hospital, schooling options and customers for what you produce. Land that is cheap because it is far and worn out collects that debt later, with interest.

Energy. This is the part I know best, and, conveniently, the part already solved. A community this size sits comfortably within a well-sized solar-and-battery system. Add solar water heating, efficient appliances and homes that get passive design right — orientation, shade, insulation — and the settlement runs off-grid without drama, with a generator that earns its diesel only a few days a year. Eskom stops being a factor in your life — an engineering outcome, not a slogan.

Food. Permaculture, stripped of the mysticism that clings to it, is a discipline for designing productive land well. A few households on two or three hectares can, with steady and ordinary effort, grow the greater part of their own vegetables, eggs, fruit and herbs. A shared tunnel keeps leafy greens and seedlings going year-round. Mushrooms suit this setting — oyster and shiitake are forgiving to grow, have a genuine market, and happen to be something I have cultivated myself. Add laying hens and a pig or two, and most of the food question is answered. The rest you buy from the farmers around you — a relationship a small community should want anyway.

The shared core. This is the piece that holds everything together — and where communal projects most often come apart, so it is worth stating exactly. A company owns the land and the shared assets: the water system, the solar plant, a workshop, the internet line, a communal building with kitchen, laundry and workspace. Each member holds shares in that company and leases an individual stand, on which they put up their own home — a tiny house, a converted container, a caravan at first, something more permanent later. The principle is simple: you own the roof over your head; the community jointly owns what is held in common. A proper shareholders’ agreement and a short set of plain bylaws do the work that goodwill alone never quite manages.

That structure keeps the cost of entry well below an equivalent smallholding, lets a family start small and improve their home over time, and gives the village a real legal entity with real rules rather than a handshake and good intentions.

Governance. A community this small needs nothing elaborate to run itself: a short founding charter, regular meetings, and a handful of clear principles. I will be straight about the early phase — it begins founder-led, because someone has to make the first decisions and carry the first risk. But the plan, written into the founding documents from day one, is to hand the village over to its residents once it is genuinely standing on its own feet.

The economics, briefly, because they deserve — and already have — a post of their own. A village like this is not a way to stop working; it is a way to change your relationship with work. Most members carry on earning much as they do now — remote work, their own business, a trade, a profession. What shifts is the cost side: shared infrastructure, self-generated power and home-grown food bring the price of a good life down sharply, so a comfortable existence no longer demands an ever-larger salary. On top sits a modest layer of shared enterprise — the mushrooms, a market stall, a unit kept for visitors — bringing in extra income and real work close to home.

An invitation

I am writing this because I am building toward it. By the middle of 2027 I will have relocated to South Africa for good, and this is the project I mean to give my energy to — what a long detour through permaculture, renewable energy and a formal ecovillage-design training has been preparing me for. I suspect more people are turning these questions over than any of us realise: people who have found the two standard answers thin, and never heard the third one said out loud.

The third alternative does not arrive on its own. It arrives because a small number of people decide to do the unglamorous work — finding the land, getting the legal structure right, and showing up for the first few difficult years.

So if any of this resonates — whether you picture yourself as a possible resident, you bring a useful skill such as building, farming, design or renewable energy, or you simply want to think the idea through with someone serious about it — I would like to hear from you. You can reach me through the contact page on this site.

The future has long felt like something decided elsewhere — a thing we either endure or escape. But a village is small enough that a determined group can genuinely shape it. That is the whole appeal: not a movement, not a manifesto, just a few families, a good piece of land, and a decision to put down roots deliberately. If that is a decision you have quietly been weighing, get in touch — I would far rather build this with company.