Age : 27
Country : South Africa
Founder: Mind Trix Media
Few young entrepreneurs in Africa have survived being accused of murder and a collision with two cars that cracked his skull. Kunene has. He created eight jobs and a profit with his website-building company, Mind Trix Media, in Cape Town where he was born-and-bred. The company does business with the big names in South Africa and as far afield as Italy, Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Angola.
On a Sunday morning, in December 2009, not long after Kunene launched the business, came a knock on the door of his mother’s house in Kayelitsha that could have spelt the end.“I opened to two men in suits. I thought they were from a church, but they were detectives who said someone had seen me committing a murder the night before.
I took them into my mother’s garage and showed them a load of T-shirts I had printed the night before and said this is what I was doing. But they arrested me and locked me up in police cells,” says Kunene. The budding entrepreneur spent a week in the cells in Gugulethu before police found the real murderer and let him go.
“All they said was ‘sorry you can go now,’” he says.
Four years later, disaster struck again in Gugulethu, this time on the main road. A car hit Kunene knocking him into the path of another heading the other way. It cracked his skull and smashed one of his legs. He spent three months in hospital and is on medication. Kunene survived to prosper, a lesson to entrepreneurs that if it doesn’t kill you, or imprison you, it makes you stronger.
