Leti Arts: An Uncompromising Passion to Enlighten Africa through Games and Comics

While attending the third edition of the Afropolitan Festival in Brussels, I had the amazing -and rather unexpected – pleasure of meeting Eyram Tawia, a Ghanaian entrepreneur in the African gaming industry who also happens to be the CEO of the first game-production studios in the sub-Saharan region. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to interview him, in the hope of sharing his story with a wider audience willing to bring about change on the continent. 

Tawia is the CEO of Leti Arts, a game development and digital comics company founded in Ghana and Kenya in 2009. The company builds games based on African history and folklore set in a 21st-century reality. To compete with the Avengers and other Western superheroes, Leti Arts has developed its very own franchise of fantastic figures: Africa’s Legends. The characters are loosely tied to historic or factual figures and fight crime all over Africa. With villains representing the many issues that need to be fixed there, such as child trafficking, corrupt presidents, false religious leaders, Tawia’s endeavor is also tied up with a strong sense of social conscience. 

Although Tawia started the company in 2009, his aspiration to make a career in the game development industry started when he was a child as he explains in his autobiography, Uncompromising Passion: The Humble Beginnings of an African Video Game Industry. Using his story as a focal point, Tawia takes the reader through the journey of how games began in Africa. Obsessed with comics and games since primary school, the entrepreneur decided to learn how to build games while still in junior high. Though very simple, the games allowed the young boy to develop a certain expertise in programming and game-development. Anxious to demonstrate his capacities, he got the opportunity to make a game of its own in 2006 for his final year thesis, which became the first video game to be developed in the sub-region. However, to his great surprise, it soon appeared that he was not the only one trying to make it in the industry. “I made my game in 2006 but in 2007, I read in the local newspapers that the first video game had been made in Africa. And it wasn’t me,” he recalls. “So, I looked out for the person who made the game and it was a Kenyan taking all the credit. So, I reached out to him to say ‘hey, you should research very well before you conclude you are the only one building games in Africa’, and he responded. He was a nice guy, so we decided to collaborate and start Leti Arts together”.

Even though founded on an uncompromising passion, the journey to set the company was not an easy one as the market was almost non-existent. “It baffled my mind that games are not made from Africa, but it is the biggest industry in the West! In the West and East, the game industry is bigger than the movie and music industries combined! Africa is still not giving anything to that market,” Tawia says. Convinced of the potential of the industry on the continent, the two friends managed to gather seed funding and seed support from the Meltwater Foundation.

GET AFRICANS TO TAKE PRIDE IN THEIR RICH HERITAGE

Even though committed to developing his business, Tawia was soon confronted with the biggest challenge yet to overcome: the lack of gaming culture on the continent. Keeping faith in his journey, he decided that the only possibility of getting ahead was getting started and he soon kickstarted different gaming projects. “The majority of Africans are still in the deprived and rural areas. Infrastructure is not very developed. So, it is seen that the problems are too many to start and build games. But Africans do play games.” With much effort and determination, Leti Arts managed to gather a devoted fanbase who, through word of mouth and dedication, attracted other gamers.

With 60% of the entire continent aged below 25, Africa is home to a large proportion of the world’s tech-savvy youth. Leti Arts has put a huge bet on this tremendous potential market. To engage with the African youth, Tawia devised a tailor-made strategy: getting Africans to take pride in their heritage by using storytelling with formats that are appealing to the generation of today. In doing so, not only does Leti Arts increase its market while growing but it also ensures the necessary preservation of the rich African culture: “We can fantasize these stories in ways that portray the rich culture of Africa just as the Japanese have done with Naruto and all these characters. People in Ghana are now speaking Japanese just because they watch Naruto, read manga, and all that. Why can’t we do that with African content and make Japanese speak Zulu or Twi? These are the things I believe storytelling can do for the continent and once we’re able to do that, we’ll have catapulted Africa to be at par with the West.”

Being on par with the Western and Eastern gaming industries, which benefit from massive funding and reap the advantages of the learning curve effects, is nonetheless no easy task as Tawia testified. Indeed, the lack of properly trained human resources was another major challenge the team had to address. “We don’t have anyone who makes games professionally on the continent,” he opined. “Everyone is self-taught, even me. (…)People are comparing your games to the Western games while the Western games have a lot of funding, a lot of culture, so the games are always very well made. But the games that we make locally after the challenges I told you, you can imagine that the games couldn’t be that quality because they’re self-funded.” To alleviate this difficulty, the entrepreneur started an internship programme where he trains developers to build games and artists to digitize their artwork. “We’ve trained about 350 interns since we started. (…) A whole lot of international students have interned with us. I do a lot of knowledge exchange. So, when you’re coming and you make games, you can train those who learn from you and you can also learn from them.”

Furthermore, Leti Arts is now expanding its borders across the world to non-local experts as it understood that it could not only rely on an African-only skillset: “At first, our motto was ‘using local expertise to make games that compete globally’, but I’ve removed that bit. Now we just have to make games that compete globally. If I know someone in London who makes good games and I have the budget to afford them, I’ll bring them to work for me. If we’re working with experts, then the local guys can learn from the experts and build quality games. So, we’re competing globally in terms of comics and hype, the games are still lagging a bit behind. So now we just want expertise and funding to inject into the game-production bit.”

Aside from game-development, distribution is also somewhat challenging. Even though growing, Internet penetration remains relatively low in Africa. It is a fact that mobile phones are widespread, but data remains quite expensive and people are reluctant to spend it on downloading apps and pay for games. In order to generate revenue, Tawia had thus to find other means. “Our games don’t make money. That’s our fantasy. (…) For now, revenue comes from contracts as consultants with USAID and other NGOs. So, we do games for malaria prevention, HIV, healthy sexual relationships. So, anyone who has money for advocacy purposes, games can be used for that purpose.”

However, consultancy contracts are just one part of the revenue stream. Indeed, Leti Arts has recently started generating revenue through a brand-new creative platform: Afrocomix. Afrocomix is a publishing platform that aims to gather all the talents on the African continent in one single virtual location. The platform is a digital app available on Google Play and the App Store that sells artwork for a minimal price, which allows the company to generate revenue through downloads with mobile money on one hand and African artists to monetize their artwork on the other. Tawia came up with the idea after realizing that Leti Arts had inspired a lot of people on the continent but that all artists were working in silos with no coordination spirit. Afrocomix was designed to overcome this difficulty: “Someone might pay one dollar to use that work as a wallpaper. The artist takes 70% and we take 30 %. (…) Any artist can send any artwork. You never know who’d like any artwork. The platform is also open to storywriters. So, if you have a novel, or a graphic novel, you can send it to us. So, it’s a publishing platform for Africans. And this platform is what we are focused on for the next ten years. We want to grow this platform to become the one stop-shop for African content, ours inclusive.”

Afrocomix was also thought-out to expand the scope of the company’s business model in order to incorporate different types of artistic expression: “Now we have added a historic bit and a comics bit to the games bit, because we’ve realized that when we make only a game, it doesn’t resonate with everybody. But when we add the stories and the comics bit, we get a larger sample and we can marry them together. The response has been massive. Consumption, however, has been a bit lower.”

For now, Afrocomix supports comics, animation, wallpapers, and novels. Tawia hopes that by the end of 2019 they will start publishing video games as well. Leti Arts’ games bit is called Africa’s Legends,a game that is meant to bring all Africans together. “It has our superheroes and it has spaces for other people to add their heroes. So, if you are in Nigeria, you can play Nigerian heroes and you can partner with friends to form superhero-teams and then you fight crime and form adventures together. Those who play in Ghana play different stories than those who play in Nigeria, but they can always collaborate together to fight real-time crime.” The game will be released exclusively on Afrocomix as the introduction to the gaming section by the end of the year and feed the universe of African artistic expressions as the company continues to grow and evolve.