Driven

He Has Sacrificed the Safety Net of a Full-time Job, and Thrown Caution to the Wind. For Banetsi Andreas Mphunga, Who Turned His Counselling Practice Into Therapy on Wheels, There’s Only One Rule: Never Stop Moving. 
 

- Kieran Legg

This wasn’t his calling, the professor told him. And on paper, maybe he was right: Banetsi Andreas Mphunga was trailing at the bottom of his class, struggling despite hours spent studying and agonising over his papers and tests. But Banetsi was equal parts stubborn and certain that psychology was the way he wanted to make a difference. And he also believed he had something nobody else had: a resilient, unbreakable entrepreneurial spirit.

Now, he’s the counsellor on wheels, a man who ditched the safety net of a fulltime job and sank his money into a Kombi to travel into impoverished communities, helping people who had given up on help a long time ago. He’s making waves, but he’s only getting started. His endgame is to peel away the stigma around mental illness and life-saving therapy, one kilometre at a time.

There were drugs. Lots of them. And as a teenager in Khayelitsha, Banetsi tried them all.

“I was a typical kid in the township,” he says. “I know what dagga tastes like, and what mandrax tastes like too.”

But unlike his friends, many who had to return to broken and abusive households, Banetsi’s home was a safe sanctuary, guarded by disciplined, inspirational and supportive women. His mother and sisters gave him the room and independence to make his own mistakes – in the aftermath of which he wouldn’t be chided, beaten or ostracised, but told where he had gone wrong, and how to correct his course.

“And so with the drugs, for example, when I saw things were going too far, that I was going to be burnt, I had the ability to see that I was heading down a dangerous path, and I pulled back,” he says.