Profile | Roller skating entrepreneur talks about finding her tribe in Hong Kong, after growing up in South Africa and being a safari guide
- Milanie Bekker trained as a safari guide after university, then as a teacher. ‘Born into the Church’, she found true acceptance at a Hong Kong roller derby
- She tells Kate Whitehead about running Madame Quad in Causeway Bay – Asia’s first and only shop dedicated to quad roller skates and roller derby
I was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1988. My family is Afrikaans. My dad was a mechanic in the army and my brother, Stephen, is two years older than me. We moved to a small town outside Johannesburg, called Stilfontein, when I was two. It was a very white town and when apartheid ended, in 1994, I remember the first day a black kid walked into the classroom.
When I was eight, Stephen and I got in-line roller skates – just one pair that we shared. I was 12 years old and about to be made head girl when we moved back to Cape Town. My mum’s whole family is in Cape Town – her two brothers, sister and parents – and we spent time with our six cousins.
Coming out
I was born into the Church. We went to the Old Apostolic Church five days a week and twice on Sundays. Women were expected to wear hats, stockings and dresses and men had to be in suits. Women were seen as lesser than men and my mum had a lifelong struggle with the Church.
When I was 14, we would knock on people’s doors and say, “Have you heard of Jesus Christ? Can I come in?” When (Australian environmentalist) Steve Irwin died in 2006, my mum and I bawled our eyes out; it was a momentous day for me.
He and primatologist Dian Fossey were the reason I went to study conservation ecology at Stellenbosch University in 2007. In my first year at university, I met Dirk at a Bible camp. We dated for a month and then he came out, but we stayed friends and now he’s my bestie.