9 July 2026

E71: Martiens Bekker: A South African Scrap Metal Artist in Norway

Martiens Bekker left the South African police force, tried forestry, then rebuilt his life twice, first in the UK, then in Norway, where he became a scrap metal artist forging sculptures from salvage.

The Unlikely Path of a South African Scrap Metal Artist Who Settled in Norway

Some emigration stories move in a straight line. Martiens Bekker’s does not. Today’s guest is a South African scrap metal artist in Norway, but before the blowtorch and the forge, he was a policeman investigating escaped patients from Weskoppies psychiatric hospital, a forestry manager, and the self-appointed mayor of a tiny town outside Cape Town.

His path did not run straight from South Africa to Norway. It ran through Israel, through a decade in Cornwall in the United Kingdom, and only then to the mountains of Telemark, where he now spends his winters forging jewellery from recycled copper and brass and his summers welding sculptures from whatever the scrapyard hands him.

From the Police Force to the Forest

Martiens was born in Ermelo in 1967, the son of a Springbok athlete who died when Martiens was still a boy. The family moved to Pretoria, then to Naboomspruit, where he finished school before joining the South African Police Force.

He worked in forensics and missing persons, tracking down patients who had escaped from Weskoppies psychiatric hospital under Article 28. It was demanding, meaningful work, and it was also where the first signs of an undiagnosed sleep disorder began, though he would not understand that for another two decades.

He left the police to study forestry management, spent a short stint in Israel, and eventually settled into art, film prop making, and a coffee shop partnership outside Cape Town.

A Detour Through Cornwall: Building a Life in the UK First

In 2009, with South Africa feeling, in his words, like it was “going down,” Martiens and his wife used her British passport to move to Cornwall. What followed was five years of genuine achievement: a coffee shop, a stint with the Coast Guard rescue team, and gallery exhibitions of his scrap metal work, including pieces bought by public figures he only later learned were well known.

But the couple watched British teenage culture pull at their sons, and made the harder call to move again rather than stay somewhere comfortable but wrong for their family.

Finding Telemark: How a Failed Business Became a Permanent Home

A chance introduction through his wife’s old friend brought an invitation to Norway: a Norwegian farmer wanted help starting a sawmill business. Martiens and his family arrived in 2014, gave up UK residency rights to do it, and watched the sawmill deal collapse within months. Most families would have looked for the next move.

Instead, a supportive school principal and a Norwegian community that welcomed the boys convinced them to stay. They rented, then bought a house in Vinje, in the Telemark region, close to Morgedal, the acknowledged birthplace of modern skiing. Martiens became a Norwegian citizen last year.

Becoming a South African Scrap Metal Artist in Norway

This is the heart of the episode. Martiens describes himself as “a busy fool” with a compulsion to see potential in discarded things: old spanners become crab legs, pick handles become the ribs of a fish, and heaps of scrap become sculptures shaped entirely by what he finds rather than what he sets out to make.

He combines blacksmithing, welding, woodwork and clay, working mostly on commission-free terms because, as he puts it, he cannot see inside somebody else’s head. In winter, he and his wife sit and make jewellery from recycled copper and brass. In summer, he sells it near a village of traditional Norwegian stabbur, wooden storehouses so historically significant they are protected as national treasures.

If documents are on your to-do list, Apostil handles it all and couriers everything straight to your door.

The Cost Nobody Warns You About

Martiens is candid about what two international moves have cost him. His brothers are scattered between New Zealand and California; one nephew he had not seen in sixteen years is now forty years old. His sister farms bees near Naboomspruit, and it took him sixteen years to see her again too.

“That’s the one thing that catches us a lot,” he says, “just not seeing the people.” His grandmother, whom the family nicknamed Siener van Niekerk, once told him to study and build something of his own, because the country would not always be as it was. Decades later, that advice still shapes how he talks to his own sons about tax systems, property, and building a life that is not dependent on any one country staying stable.

Would He Do It Again?

Asked directly, Martiens does not pretend it is simple. His heart, he says, is still in South Africa, but his mind cannot reconcile itself to what he sees on return visits. He credits the move with giving his sons a Viking-obsessed, Norwegian-fluent, entirely different life to the one he had, and both have thanked him for it in their own ways.

But he is equally honest that if his brother-in-law’s disabled son needs him, he will go back to South Africa without hesitation. There is no tidy resolution here, only an unusually thoughtful account of what it actually costs, and what it actually buys, to start again twice.

Connect with Martiens Bekker

Martiens shares his sculpture and jewellery work under the name MJ Bekker or Martiens Bekker on Instagram and Facebook.

Episode Transcript

Jan Hugo:

Today on the Relocated South African podcast, I’m joined by Martiens Bekker all the way from Norway. Welcome Martiens, where are you actually talking to me from?

Martiens Bekker:

Thank you very much for the invite. I went into automatic mode there. It took you a while to realise as well, anyway, well for your listeners, there’s a little bit of Afrikaans although I think most of them speak it anyway. Thank you very much. We live in…

Jan Hugo:

Ingles.

Martiens Bekker:

Our county, if you can call it that, is called Vinje and the area is Telemark. So if you look at Norway, the southern part of Norway, we’re kind of in the middle of the southern part. So everything is about four hours away from us. So that’s where we are, in the mountains.

Jan Hugo:

Okay. So it’s quite platelant.

Martiens Bekker:

No, it’s mountains. This is where, not too far from us, it’s where the slalom ski style started. And they actually had a Winter Olympics there as well.

Jan Hugo:

Okay. Absolutely, in Lillehammer. Are you close to Lillehammer?

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah, Lillehammer is more to the north. Yeah, a little bit more north. We are at the place where the Winter Olympics is, called Morgedal. We’ve got within 40 minutes drive, we’ve got about three ski resorts. The furthest one is about 40 minutes.

Jan Hugo:

And are you guys skiers?

Martiens Bekker:

I’m an absolute acrobatic skier. If I get on the skis, I just… No, I mean not in a bad way. I do stunts that nobody has seen ever before. I can ice skate. Now, people don’t cry enough. My wife can and my boys can, but… I think I lied about my weight, because your weight needs to be right, you know, for the skis.

Jan Hugo:

Wow. Okay. So you’re like me, I’m not a skier, I’m a faller.

Martiens Bekker:

It’s so easy.

Jan Hugo:

Awesome. So Martiens, where are you from originally and when did you leave South Africa?

Martiens Bekker:

Yes, so I was born in Ermelo. Yeah, 1967, lifetime ago. So, yeah, 1967.

Jan Hugo:

Were you born in 19…

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah, my late father was a teacher at, I can’t remember the schools. I think it was at Van den Merwe? He was so small. He passed away in 1971. So I can’t really remember anything. He and his brothers and one sister were all Springbok athletes. So everybody knew about… My wife just arrived. Everybody knew about him, but I can’t remember very little. We moved after he passed away, moved to Pretoria. Later, when I was standard 8, it was 1983, we moved up to Naboomspruit, which was just amazing, going to live there. And then, yeah, I was in the police force, and then I went to study forestry, forestry management, and then I left South Africa, went to Israel for a bit, less than a year, and then came back and… This way, that way, my wife, my previous wife and I, we had a son. Then she unfortunately left. So it was just me and my son. We were still young and then I met my present wife and she had a son. So we got together. My wife is from Cape Town, which I always say is not really part of South Africa. They actually have family with the surname Visser, you know, real Afrikaans, and they’re fine. At that point, I lived in a small town called Philadelphia outside, it’s not really a town, outside Cape Town. I was the self-appointed mayor there. And then we met and yeah, at some point she had a little business. She was in the UK because her mother is British, father is South African.

Jan Hugo:

Go. Okay.

Martiens Bekker:

So she was in the UK. She and her husband got separated and then she later came back to South Africa with her son and she was in Hout Bay, she had a little business there, plant nursery thing, landscaping. So I made sculptures, big things that turn in the wind and stuff like that. And so that’s how we met. And then I had a coffee shop with a woman, she’s also, her father was also a Bekker, but she was married, Anelette Asplen, she got the Pepper Tree, we started that. And we met and then at some point, we just, you know, I always felt that Africa was, I don’t know, it’s going sideways. Well, not even sideways, it’s going down. So we thought, well, let’s try it, because she’s got a British passport. Let’s move to the UK. So we left in 2009, and moved to Cornwall in the UK. We stayed there for a while. We had a coffee shop there and I was in the Coast Guard rescue team, and I did my art and did exhibitions. Did really well, if I must say so myself. It was incredible. But then we started to see, you know, things. It’s kind of like the British children go from 10 to 18, you know, it’s like…

Jan Hugo:

Thank…

Martiens Bekker:

They lose that middle part. And even though it was a small town called Port Isaac, I mean, there was probably 10 pubs in 100 metres, you know, which is not the biggest problem. There was a little bit more other stuff that was being sniffed and, you know, that kind of stuff. And we just saw this and we saw that we don’t want our boys to go through this, just suddenly become these confused adults, you know.

Jan Hugo:

Hmm.

Martiens Bekker:

By accident, I mean, we were thinking Zambia or Scotland or something like that, you know. By accident, my wife met an old friend and she was involved with a Norwegian. He had a farm, a little sawmill, and then he found that I was involved in forestry, invited us over to start a small sawmill business, which we can talk about later, maybe. That didn’t work out so well, but that, you know… Anybody that has moved, you know yourself, all the paperwork and all the loops you’ve got to jump through. By the time we got into Norway, which is very difficult, we couldn’t go back because I had a residence visa, but I had to give that up to be in Norway. And then our boys, then at school, started school, very proud of them. They got on the bus and… and went to the school where people speak Norwegian. The youngest one, he just thought this is a kind of extension of Afrikaans or something. He picked the language up very quickly. The oldest one took a little bit, but they both speak Norwegian fluently now. So yeah, by that time, when this business opportunity didn’t materialise, and it’s not because figures and numbers didn’t work out, we found the guy who invited us is just into the bottle, maybe some other stuff, so it just didn’t work out. Then we realised, you know, we are here. So the school principal at that time, he was adamant that we must stay and helped us, and, yeah, we rented the house, and then we bought the house, and this is where we are at the moment.

Jan Hugo:

That’s such an interesting story. Which year was this now? You left…

Martiens Bekker:

So we left South Africa in 2009 and we came over to Norway in 2014.

Jan Hugo:

So you were five years in the UK. And in that time, did you qualify for a British passport? Sorry.

Martiens Bekker:

It’s more like 80 years ago now… In the UK, I don’t know if they’ve changed it, but if you wanted to move to the UK, and you want to marry a British citizen, you had to apply from your home country. So my wife first had to go over to the UK to get an address, because you have to have an address in the UK, but you have to apply from your home country. So then we went over… thinking are we going to set things up and then go back to South Africa, do the applications, you know, and move on from there. But by the time we’d done all that, that’s a lot of money. And then I found a court case where, if you are a member of the Church of England, you don’t have to go back to your own country. You can… So I found this court case, that I was the detective in the police force that helped. So this guy took the Home Office to court for discrimination, because everybody else must do it, except if you’re a member of the Church of England. So I think when we won this case, Home Office put my file next to Osama Bin Laden. Yeah, every time I had to renew my licence, you had to stay there 10 years, then you can apply for citizenship.

Jan Hugo:

Persona non grata.

Martiens Bekker:

They changed the criteria of my visa. But you have to be on a ten-year consecutive visa. Even the last one, I was the legal responsible person for my stepson, which I’m not. But it was on my visa. So it was very weird. Very strange. Because you have your visa, there’s something linked to your visa for those four years, criteria for why you’re there, why you’re allowed to be there. And the last one they issued me was that I’m the, I can’t remember the exact wording, but like the legal responsible person for my wife’s son, which I wasn’t. And so I didn’t have to do the 10 years consecutive.

Jan Hugo:

Okay. So, now do you, sorry.

Martiens Bekker:

I’m not saying that. No, no, no, no, yes, no way. I became a Norwegian citizen last year, June.

Jan Hugo:

That makes life a lot easier. But do you speak the language?

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah. Not as good as I want to, but I can help myself.

Jan Hugo:

But enough for their criteria to become a citizen.

Martiens Bekker:

Oh yeah, you had to do the citizen test, the background, you have to do a little test, which is to just click some buttons, blocks, and then you had to do a language speaking test, which I did with a Ukrainian woman. And all they really want, I mean, I knew the guys, it’s a very small town we have, I knew the two, what do you call them? Judges or whatever, and they basically just want to see that you’re trying, kind of like, you know, but still make sense. So my wife finds it very difficult that she wants to interrupt me but she can’t.

Jan Hugo:

She’s welcome. If I just think back now, it’s actually quite an interesting position to be in, to be able to ask you about moving to two different countries. What was harder, moving to the UK or moving to Norway?

Martiens Bekker:

Are you talking about how it felt, or the actual doing of it, you know, the paperwork?

Jan Hugo:

No, no, I’m just saying in terms of the whole experience, what was the better experience?

Martiens Bekker:

For me, it was in the beginning an adventure. It was, most times, kind of like, we’re going to see another part of the world. But of course, and we’re probably going to talk about it a little bit later, there’s a lot of other things that you don’t think about at that point. You don’t think about the family that you’re leaving behind. But for me it was, yes, it was, I was excited, new experience. The paperwork was a nightmare.

Jan Hugo:

And it’s a repetition of paperwork because you had to do it in the UK, and again.

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah, kind of. Yeah, and we came over, to… my wife is sending me notes now. We came when there was still Brexit. It was still Brexit. So my wife could come to Norway under the European Economic Area Agreement because Norway is not…

Jan Hugo:

Hehehehehe. Okay, before we record…

Martiens Bekker:

…strictly speaking, EU. They put an economic area agreement in place, so she could do it because she’s a British citizen. That might have made it easier for us to come over. I mean, for any other South African, if any South African tells me, listen, I want to move to Norway, I would say to them, find another country. Find somewhere where they speak English, at least.

Jan Hugo:

Okay, of course. Yeah. Well, although the two people that I’ve spoken to, the South Africans, are very happy, one, actually, they lived in Malaysia before they moved to Norway, so the cold was a bit of a shock, and the other couple, they just love living in Norway. They really are happy.

Martiens Bekker:

No, of course, Norway has its benefits. I don’t know where the key is to our house. When we bought it, we had a key, but then that key got misplaced. Then they changed the lock after about four years, and now I don’t know where that key is. We never lock it. Yes, so you have those benefits. It’s safe. People are nice. Very nice. Medical is good. It’s really good.

Jan Hugo:

That’s a huge benefit.

Martiens Bekker:

But it’s, you know, when people want to move to a country, like maybe any country, find out how the tax system works, you know, for one, because they don’t really want to tell you, it seems. So it’s complicated everywhere, but Norway is, everything is open source, you know. I can go on the internet and go and see what the mayor in town earns. Businesses, you can go and see how businesses operate. They’re open with that. They don’t miss nothing.

Jan Hugo:

And very low levels of corruption.

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah, I think they’ve got looting and also corruption, then, you know, it depends on where you look. In general, the people are very proud to pay tax. You know, you get a lot back. It’s, yeah, it’s kind of a status symbol, as my wife says, but I don’t know where exactly… in the whole world, they’ve got, you know, beautiful fuels, but they still have permits and… to save the fuels, so they can dump chemicals. So there’s some stuff happening. If you dig hard enough, you’ll find it. But in general, it’s too cold for criminals.

Jan Hugo:

Absolutely. They like warm weather. Although in Dubai they get their hands chopped off, so probably that’s too hot for them. But yeah, I hear you. I think that makes a lot of sense. In terms of your creative journey, if we can call it that, because I saw your YouTube video about your scrap art, I just find that fascinating. When did that start?

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah. Well, I’ve always done it since I was a child, always pick something up and make something out of it. But I started in 2000, was in Israel in 1999. In 2000, I decided I’m just going to follow this. Then I lived up on the West Coast, Zandfontein.

Jan Hugo:

Mm-hmm.

Martiens Bekker:

And then everything happened, met Annalet, who’s got the property in Philadelphia, wasn’t using it. I managed to get the workshops, two big workshops next to her property. At the other end of this property, it was meant to be a hospital, but the house stood empty. And it was a lawyer or somebody in Bloubergstrand who owned it. And at that point, I started making props for Warner Brothers productions and Dreamworks productions for films, and for a German film as well, I made some props for them. This lawyer who owns the house, you’ve got the three properties, you’ve got the house, and then on the left part was the stables of the hospital. And then I had the workshops right next to that. He came to me and said he was approached by a Bollywood company to use the house if they wanted to shoot a film. And here I’m involved in the film industry. And I said, well, you asked me if I could kind of be the project overseer, manager, whatever, you know, make sure. So I asked him, well, when they’re done with the house, can I maybe rent it? And he said, sure. So I used them to clean the house for me, because the house had been empty for many years. Big house. In the end, because then I was still single, with just me and my son. And they got a young family, a husband and wife and two sons and a daughter. And I got them to share the house with me. That’s a really big house. Like I said, built as a… but it’s cob, built with clay and straw. Really nice house. So we lived there. When I met my present wife, she moved in with us after some time as well.

Jan Hugo:

Wow, that’s amazing. Maybe just for the listeners, and we’ll obviously include some details, but exactly what do you do? What is the art that you do? Maybe you’ve got a…

Martiens Bekker:

I’m just a busy fool. I’ve got this passion to just, when I find things, things that are discarded, to give them new life. And I can kind of, I’m a little bit crazy, I can look at a heap of scrap and then I can see pieces, parts of things. And then I’ll collect it. It’s a good thing the camera’s facing this way because my workshops and stuff is that way.

Jan Hugo:

You…

Martiens Bekker:

I’ve got so much stuff there and I know where every piece is that I’ve collected, and I’ve got a kind of an idea what I’m going to use it for. So I built sculptures from scrap metal. Mainly when we lived in Port Isaac, it’s a coastal town, then I kind of locked into the theme there. I made a lot of crabs on that video that you saw there on BBC Watchpoint. Crabs, fish, you know, things like that. But a lot of times, the piece I find dictates what I’m going to make. But of course, I can’t just make something. I was asked by another South African here in Norway to build him this big man, which kind of disappears. You can’t really see the head, it’s just a piece, then the hands and the feet are detailed. It’s not my original idea. It’s something he wanted me to make, and it’s another South African artist who has made one. He saw it. He asked me if I could do it. So I do stuff like that. I do some blacksmithing. Of course, I do clay. I do clay as well and do wood, wood sculpture. And I combine these things.

Jan Hugo:

Bye. So it’s not all, how would you say, blacksmith, that’s welding and putting things together, metal things. So you also do wood.

Martiens Bekker:

I used a lot of blacksmithing technique and try to manipulate the metal, but then I do just normal blacksmithing as well.

Jan Hugo:

That’s absolutely fascinating. When you, what you’re saying is, when you see it, you can see some pieces of scrap metal. I think on that video I saw you use tools to make a sculpture. Old tools.

Martiens Bekker:

Tools, yeah, yeah, spanners, you know, if you want to make a crab, you know, spanners already got those, and the little legs, and so, so lots of stuff. We were down at Falmouth, I think Falmouth is the second harbour where the Titanic, when it was lifted, went to Falmouth. And then, of course, but anyway, we were there, at markets, people selling things, and art related things as well. I had my stall up there. The boys were still small. The youngest one, he would just take off. So he had a rope around his middle. My wife could hold him so that he doesn’t disappear. So I was there standing talking to people, and this one guy came and he spoke to me, and he wanted to buy a fish I made from pick handles. So the ribs of the fish, these pick handles, and then the spade for the tail and the spade for the head. And he, of course, heard my accent.

Jan Hugo:

You…

Martiens Bekker:

I’m from South Africa, we’re talking about South Africa. He said, he’s just going to figure out how he’s going to get it home, he’ll come back. He came back, he bought the fish, and my wife at that point got a chance to talk to me. She said, do you know who that is? And I said to her, no, I don’t know who that is. She said, no, that’s a drummer of Queen. I said, what, the Queen? The Queen has got a band? She said, no man, that’s a thing. Because I’m from, I would always say I’m from Naboomspruit…

Jan Hugo:

No freaking way. You…

Martiens Bekker:

That’s not much, we’re not into these things, yeah. It was incredible. On another occasion, Henry, who owns the Red Bull Racing Team, bought a lot of stuff from me. It was really good. I mean, I did okay in South Africa, but in England, really well. It was good. It was fun.

Jan Hugo:

That was… And how does one price, I mean, I don’t want to ask you your secret. Some suck…

Martiens Bekker:

This person. Sometimes I don’t like doing commission work. I really hate it. I cannot see what’s in somebody else’s head. If you want something, I’ll make you something. If you don’t like it, it’s fine. I don’t ask for deposits because that just causes problems. If I make something somebody doesn’t like, it’s fine, nice to meet you, I’ll sell it somewhere else. Did I miss your question there again? What was it?

Jan Hugo:

Yeah. No, no, I’m saying how do you price it, because, you know, at…

Martiens Bekker:

But yeah, the price is sometimes per hour. So I’ll work on this for an hour and kind of try and keep track, because, you know, artists, we’re really bad business people. And otherwise we just make stuff. I just make it up. I suck it out of my thumb. So my wife is passing me notes and letters, and she wants me to show you the biggest accent in Norway.

Jan Hugo:

My word, that’s a Norwegian thing. Wow, that is absolutely amazing.

Martiens Bekker:

So, get it in here all the way. And the foot is like that.

Jan Hugo:

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you do all that carving, et cetera?

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah, that’s the whole axe, and that’s all the carving. Yeah, that’s what they call a bearded axe.

Jan Hugo:

So is that a Viking axe? Wow, that’s absolutely… and is that for sale?

Martiens Bekker:

No.

Jan Hugo:

Wife’s got to show her face now, because we’re going to have people asking, so where’s Martiens’ wife? She’s hiding and she’s sending notes and passing things. So she really needs to just show her face, for people who watch and listen. Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Jan Hugo:.

Martiens Bekker:

Hi, nice to meet you. He goes all over the place when he talks. I have to try to keep up.

Jan Hugo:

And John, is that your name? No, but that’s fine. That’s why I’m asking questions. But it’s such an interesting journey. Thank you very much. And that art is just amazing, absolutely amazing.

Martiens Bekker:

He does a lot of clay as well, and yeah, anything, I burn a pot and throw it out and it comes back as something else.

Jan Hugo:

That is absolutely… I wish I had some.

Martiens Bekker:

Everything I’m making about it just is, you know. So, you know, kind of. That’s the deal.

Jan Hugo:

Yeah. Okay, but you don’t paint.

Martiens Bekker:

No, no, it’s a strange thing. I can do a three-dimensional sculpture, but I can’t draw. I can draw a little bit three-dimensionally, but I won’t praise myself. My brother, well, we’re probably going to talk about families and stuff because we’re all over the world. My one brother in America, he’s Christian Bekker. He’s my favourite artist. He’s so good. He, at some point, got Nelson Mandela’s signature twice on his paintings and he made a signature for him as well. He’s good.

Jan Hugo:

Talk to him as well. Yeah, we’ll get to that. So, Martiens, just last thing on the art, do you see art as a job or is it a hobby?

Martiens Bekker:

What? Okay, I’ve been diagnosed with narcolepsy, which is a sleep disorder. I was diagnosed here in Norway after I had sepsis in my back in 2016. But I kind of knew something was wrong for years. But I thought everybody’s got these problems, don’t you? But it got a lot worse in 2016. That’s kind of where it came from. I always had this problem, you know, where I was in the police, couldn’t stay awake to do my dockets. I stay awake when I’m investigating. I did a lot of, I don’t know if you know about Weskoppies Hospital, the asylum, when people escaped there, Article 28 patients, when you’ve committed a crime and they put you there to see if you’re compos mentis. When they escaped, I had to go and find them, and I did.

Jan Hugo:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martiens Bekker:

Suicide investigation, not really suicide, but I’ll go and do the investigation, if I feel there’s foul play, I’ll hand it over to the old murder and robbery unit. So that was my work, but as soon as I sat down to start documenting, I would fall asleep while I’m writing and stuff. So that didn’t work out so well. So after I resigned, I managed to study. I had to do one year over, but I kind of started to figure out there’s something wrong. And when I was sick here with the sepsis, I said to my wife, now let’s have a look at it. So I was diagnosed in 2017. So it’s kind of now my job. This is what I do. I do other work on the farms. Farmers will come to me to fix stuff as well. You know, out making firewood for friends of mine who’ve got a bakery, an old traditional bakery. They use about 40 cubic metres of wood in the summer season. So I make that wood and do stuff like that. But mainly here, I sell, we make a lot of jewellery. Sorry, Jan Hugo:, we sit during winter and make a lot of jewellery from recycled copper and brass and things. And that we sell during summer.

Jan Hugo:

Okay, well that is just absolutely fascinating. And do you do it at markets or?

Martiens Bekker:

Just about five kilometres from us down the road, there’s a place called Mjønøy, and it’s got that O-N with a line through it, you know, because the Norwegian alphabet’s got three extra letters, or three extra sounds. They’re good friends of mine. I’ve known them since we came in 2014. So I go and pitch. I’ve got two big army tents. I pitch it there. The whole place has got these old wooden buildings.

Jan Hugo:

Okay.

Martiens Bekker:

That is very traditional to Scandinavia. They call them stabbur. They’re actually like Lego houses. Like, I’ll see it, and you can see it’s logs. Wood logs. So they used to build them, and they can take them apart, especially in winter, because then they can drag them across the lakes, which are now iced over. So they kind of moved after the animals. So that place has got these houses, which have been there since 1968, I think, is…

Jan Hugo:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Martiens Bekker:

All national treasures, so you have to look after them. And they’ve got a traditional bakery there, they go at three, four o’clock in the morning, they pack the whole oven inside full of wood, and then they light it, and then they just scrape the ash out, and they bake the whole day in that oven.

Jan Hugo:

Martiens, let’s just get back to the journey and you talking about family. If you think back, what’s been kind of the most difficult part of this whole journey? Is it family and missing family?

Martiens Bekker:

Yes, it’s friends and family, family and friends, whichever way you want to say it. I went over to the US earlier this year to go and see my brother and his children. I couldn’t see the third one, he’s got three children, I couldn’t meet up with the third one. But you know, my brother, we tried to work out, I thought it was 30 years since I’d seen him last. And it is just, you know, you’ve… His children were very close to me. They spent a lot of time with me. And then I saw, especially the oldest son, I saw him in 2009, and now it’s 16 years later, he’s 40 years old. And I went to where he lives, a little town called Tehachapi in California, up the mountains near Bakersfield. And he’ll show me places, he’s done this here and he’s done that there. And I felt like, yeah, I wasn’t there. I was not part of his life. My younger brother is in New Zealand. He works presently in Australia. His oldest son is a policeman in Australia now, 32 maybe. I saw him last when he was four or five years old. They’ve got another son, I haven’t met him. That’s the part, you know. I’ve got family in South Africa. My mom is still there. My sister and her husband are bee farmers at Crecy, close to Naboomspruit up in the north. I’ve been there now twice, but I also hadn’t seen them before I went back, it was also 16, 17 years that we hadn’t seen each other.

Jan Hugo:

I think, you know, somebody said yesterday there’s two things in immigration. One is the cost of immigration, the other one is the price of immigration. And I think this, you know, missing family, being away from family and loved ones, I think, yeah, I guess that’s the price we pay, you know, for a better life or safety, or whatever reasons we decide to leave. But I’m the same, my kids live in America. Grandchildren are now 14 and 12. They’ve just grown away from us because we just don’t see enough of them. They were here in November, but ultimately they’ve become strangers. And that’s sad. And sometimes I get really the moorin when I think about it, that we couldn’t stay in South Africa. Because in any normal society, you should be able to live in your country.

Martiens Bekker:

Some of the, of course, friends that stayed behind, to be honest, out of the friends I still have there, most of them have done well, done fairly well. So we had a choice, you could stay, it’s not the… I don’t mind, I’ve got no problem with those that stayed, I’ve got no problem with those that left. It’s always been like that. I mean, my ancestors… My Bekker ancestor, his grave is from Robben Island. We went there just a couple of years after they started, when the Dutch went there. So people have always been moving. Can you imagine, in those days, you get on a ship and you leave, and you never, you don’t even hear… Now we can at least phone people and do WhatsApp calls and stuff. But still, yes, that’s the one thing that catches us a lot. Just not seeing the people.

Jan Hugo:

Okay. I think that’s a sad part of immigration. I think the worst part is when something goes wrong. It’s hard enough when things are going well, but when parents get sick or children get sick and you can’t, it’s not just a matter of hopping on a plane. I always say when you look at the people in Portugal that come from the UK, they go home for a weekend. It’s not like immigration for them. For us, it’s a much bigger journey. So yeah, I think that’s…

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah.

Jan Hugo:

That’s unfortunately the way it is, right? If you think about…

Martiens Bekker:

And so our main objective was for our sons, to give them a better chance, because we saw… my grandmother was Stella van Niekerk. I call her ‘Siener van Niekerk’. She said to me, you must go and study. You must get a degree, because this country won’t always be the way it is. She was right in many ways. So…

Jan Hugo:

Mm.

Martiens Bekker:

We left for our sons, for better opportunities, but then I took them away from their family, their cousins. That’s… yeah.

Jan Hugo:

Same here. But if you think back, would you do it again?

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah, it’s a difficult one. A difficult one. I don’t know.

Jan Hugo:

If it… If you look at them where they are today, do you think it was the right decision?

Martiens Bekker:

No, absolutely. The youngest one, he’s done what they call, but you’d probably call in English a carpenter, but you know, they build houses out of wood, yeah. So he’s in construction, loves it, loves every moment of it. He’s big into the Viking thing. They do this, what they call LARPing, a live action replay. And he’s got this whole Viking thing that he dresses up in. The older one, he studied in Oslo. He has thanked us for taking him out of the UK. Some of his friends stayed behind, has not gone down the right road. He has once told me, said thank you very much for taking me out of there. You don’t know, you don’t know.

Jan Hugo:

You’ve got to make the decision with the facts that you have, and you can’t look over your shoulder. What do you think, other than family, what have you lost by leaving South Africa?

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah, you know, my heart, my heart is in South Africa, you know, but my mind is not there anymore, in terms of, I just cannot… I’ve been there, I’ve been back three times now, and I just see everything is falling apart. You know, it’s, I just cannot align myself with that. I mean, I think, I know, I think I probably would have been in jail or something, because I just can’t see how… You know, being in the police force, was something I really loved, the work, and to see what has happened now. A friend of mine, we’ve been friends since standard five. He’s gone on an early pension now, he was in forensics. He was actually a police photographer and he did most of the farm killings in the beginning, and it traumatised him, so he went over to something else in forensics. And he just says he’s so glad he got this early pension. He said, he cannot even explain it. He said it is completely, if it’s not corrupt, it’s just complete incompetence. He says it’s unbelievable. But then again, you know, others have done well. So maybe, I don’t know, it’s a difficult one.

Jan Hugo:

No, look, it’s, but I mean, on that note, can you see yourself going back?

Martiens Bekker:

Well, now that we are empty nesters, we kind of thought about it. My brother-in-law, Jan Hugo: Steenkamp, he’s quite a big bee farmer. He’s got something like 4,000 bees, if I remember correctly. He does a lot of pollination and stuff, that’s the big work. He grew up on a farm. He speaks Sesotho and Shangaan fluently. They went for a year to New Zealand.

Jan Hugo:

Hahaha.

Martiens Bekker:

They came back with a disabled son, and the son couldn’t get permanent residence. So he came back and went back to South Africa. I will go back, and I have been, the times we went back, we went to them, and I actually went there to help them secure the farmhouse, because I can weld, and to build metal boxes over the windows and gates in the walkways. So if we should go back, I don’t know, my wife… I don’t think she’s so… We will probably have to go back because his son, he’s got Angelman syndrome. So he needs 24-hour people with him. And if something happens to him, I’ll have to go back. I’ll have to go and look after him.

Jan Hugo:

That is unbelievable. Martiens, and, I mean, to get to the end. If somebody came to you now, today, say a family member or a youngster who’s just finishing school in South Africa, what advice would you give him?

Martiens Bekker:

Well, you figure out how business works. You figure out how to make money. Passive income. You figure out this tax system. It’s like, no, that’s what I’m telling my sons, because yes, my father passed away, my mother remarried, but he wasn’t a father as such. Dear, establish yourself. You know, get a property, get yourself just established so that you’ve got something. Not that it’s always, not that it’s everything, but I’ve told them also, you know, the only thing is just paying taxes and debt and change. So things might change. But for now, you know, they both speak Norwegian, they can go to Sweden. They understand Afrikaans because I kept on speaking Afrikaans to them. They try and speak a little bit, so they can go to countries, maybe the Netherlands, not that they should. But I think what we’ve done is we’ve given them a much bigger scope. They’ve got family in America, they can go there, you know, at least.

Jan Hugo:

Yep. And how do they see themselves? Do they see themselves as South African or Norwegian?

Martiens Bekker:

The oldest one is a little bit in between British and Norwegian, because he was born in Oxford. The youngest one sees himself as South African as Norwegian. But strangely enough, people pick up, although he speaks Norwegian really well, they still pick up something and will ask him where he’s from. And then he’ll say South Africa. But he left there basically three years old, three and a half years old. But he’s been back. He’s been back with me to go and meet family.

Jan Hugo:

Last question, if you had to advise somebody about starting over in a new country, what would your advice be?

Martiens Bekker:

Figure out how they tax you. But it is, it’s terrible. It’s as if they want to trick you, you know. Because, honestly, there are people that just figure it out and they’re doing well. I don’t mind paying taxes, you know, pay what’s due, but figure it out. And then, you must, don’t put your expectations too high, you know.

Jan Hugo:

It seems like that taxi’s in there.

Martiens Bekker:

Like everything looks so rosy, you know, the grass is greener on the other side, you know why? Because there’s more shit there, so just be open-minded that your problems are everywhere, you know. But yes, you’re in Portugal, I mean, Portugal is a fairly safe country.

Jan Hugo:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s sunshine. We came here because we like it, it’s very similar to Cape Town. So we don’t like the…

Martiens Bekker:

Well, rather good. I’m sitting here looking at the snow. It doesn’t want to melt.

Jan Hugo:

Wow, it’s nice and warm now. So we like it when summer comes. So, no, it’s, yeah, it’s very good.

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah. You cannot, sorry about your question, you cannot, the one thing that I regret a lot is, of course, this gap in your relationships with family. But you cannot, you have to make that choice. You don’t have to cut them off, of course. Nowadays we can keep really good contact. But you’re not there.

Jan Hugo:

That, it’s like being at birthdays and being at big events and so on. It’s not always possible. And that’s what you miss out on, and what they miss out on, with their cousins and family. That’s unfortunately one of the things about immigrating.

Martiens Bekker:

My sister and I, we speak every morning, during the day, every night, you know, leave messages through WhatsApp. And I want to know that they’re safe, you know. But if something happens to them, I’m not there. It’s going to take me three, four days to get there.

Jan Hugo:

Mm. And that’s dreadful, dreadful. Martiens, thank you so much, man. I’ll put in the show notes where people can get information. You’ve got a website, haven’t you?

Martiens Bekker:

Yeah. Somewhere. I put stuff under my name on, I think I put it on Instagram, but I see it goes everywhere. I was banned on Facebook at some point, but I’ve got a page again, and I see if I put something on Instagram, it goes there as well. So people can find me under, this is my name, MJ Bekker or Martiens Bekker.

Jan Hugo:

Ha ha ha! Okay. But, but, it’s back. Awesome. I will do that. And I’m going to put that link to that YouTube video you did on, on BBC, on the show notes as well. So people can see it. Awesome. And thank you so much for sharing. Jeepers. That’s an interesting journey. I’m so glad we connected. Thank you so much.

Martiens Bekker:

Thank you. It was fun. Thank you, yeah.

Jan Hugo:

Thank you. To our listeners, if this episode resonated with you, please consider sharing it with someone who might enjoy the conversation. You can find more episodes of The Relocated South African on your favourite podcast platform, or visit our website, therelocatedsouthafrican.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.