This story was first published in March 2021. Kusini Yengi signed with Portsmouth in League One on the weekend, joining brother Tete in England. When Kusini debuted for Western Sydney Wanderers last season, his father Ben, watching his son live for the first time ever, gave a wonderful interview on Paramount+, which went viral on social media. This is their incredible story.
There may be no better story to show how Australian football links this country to the world than the Yengi family’s tale that sweeps from academia into the A-League, and across thousands of kilometres from Africa to Adelaide.
A-League fans will know the names of Kusini Yengi, and his younger brother Tete.
There are no prouder observers of these two burgeoning careers than their father Ben and mother Emma, but in Ben’s case from a distance of some 12,000km – specifically, from the border of South Sudan and Uganda in East-Central Africa where the 81-year-old continues to find ways of providing health and education services to the impoverished region he came from decades ago.
The Yengi family’s story is a remarkable narrative of Ben finding and building a new home in Australia, and contributing so much to the SA community that he was awarded an OAM, but never forgetting the needs of the society in Africa where he was born and raised.
For years after arriving in Adelaide in the early 1970s, Ben studied and worked for a range of refugee-advocacy, multicultural and health bodies, as well as the University of Adelaide. He also spent more than a decade arranging for seven nephews, nieces and other relatives to leave the refugee camp in Uganda where his father, brother, sister-in-law, niece and eight cousins all had died from various diseases, and themselves make a new home in South Australia.
“My experience in working in Australia for many refugees from many places – South America, Asia, Central European countries and in many Aboriginal communities – motivates me,” Ben told us by email from Uganda. “I love working in the public service.”
But as Kusini and Tete discovered football in their childhoods in Adelaide – and the fact they had a real talent for the game – so their parents began a drive to fund and build first a medical clinic and then a nursery school in the South Sudanese district of Kajokeji, home to tens of thousands of refugees displaced by civil war.
Both were built with handmade bricks and in the case of the hospital is staffed by doctors from the US who fly in periodically, paid for by Ben’s foundation.
“South Sudan hasn’t got many hospitals,” Ben said. “The few hospitals that they have don’t have qualified doctors and nurses, good medicines or a regular supply of drugs. The hospital that I built has strict rules and no corruption.”
It has meant that since 2007 he has been based there, appointed commissioner of the Central Equatoria State by the South Sudanese government in 2013, while his sons largely grew up back in Adelaide with Emma.
“There are a lot of sick people and very limited access to healthcare,” explains his son, Kusini. “He brings over doctors from America every couple of months, and when people hear that one is coming, they walk for hours to be seen.
“The level of education there is very low, the teaching is very simple. So dad built a nursery school as well, and has shipped over containers of bicycles as almost no one has a car.
“He’s getting quite old now, his health isn’t the best and our whole family has been advising him to come back to Australia – but he’s insistent on keeping going, especially as a lot of his funding has dried up during COVID.”
Ben’s eldest, Ty, became a doctor in South Australia, and regularly travels to Kajokeji to offer his services in his father’s hospital. Sadly his second son passed away but the other two sons, Kusini and Tete, forsook Ben’s advice to follow Ty into medicine, and pursued a career in football – Kusini signing with Adelaide United and Tete switching to NSW last year to join Newcastle.
“When we were young we’d go to the park to play football everyday, and it always ended with a fight,” Tete recalls with a laugh. “No one was happy, I can tell you. He was my elder brother so of course he would try to bully me – but it actually helped me grow.”
Their one regret is that their dad can’t see them play in the flesh.
“It’s a bit disappointing that he hasn’t been able to see our careers grow,” said Kusini. “He watched me once or twice in the NPL, but it would be pretty special for him to see us score.”
Not that distance has diminished Ben’s pride in his son’s achievements to date. “They had qualified to enter universities in Australia to pursue degrees but both have intensive interests in football,” he said. “I have therefore encouraged them to pursue football to their maximum potential.
“I am praying hard for them to develop football skills that are acceptable at international level. I am very proud of them because things like the internet, Skype, Facebook, YouTube etc, all keep me close to my two children in Australia.
“My pride in them keeps on growing bigger and bigger every week.”
