From Africa, an iPhone game

Through centuries, Africa's Masai tribesmen have struggled against marauding predators. Now a virtual version of that struggle could be happening on an iPhone near you.

"Defend your village by feeding and driving away the animals before they crash it and feed on your livestock and garden!" explains a summary of the game "iWarrior" in Apple's App Store. Threats include "thundering elephants," "mighty rhinos," "swift cheetahs" and "crafty hyenas."

The game has won praise for its graphics, music and concept. And it illustrates the global influence of Silicon Valley. Technologies such as the Internet and companies such as Apple are often credited with "flattening" the world economy, giving anyone, anywhere with the requisite skills the opportunity to, say, build a game for the iPhone or create an app on Facebook.

"IWarrior" is "a feed 'em up game, not a shoot 'em up," as co-creator Eyram Tawia put it. But what might be most remarkable is that "iWarrior" actually comes out of Africa, the hinterlands of computer innovation. Tawia, a Ghanan, and Wesley Kirinya, a Kenyan, overcame considerable obstacles to develop the first product of their startup, Leti Games.

The game has been described as Africa's first commercial contribution to the multibillion-dollar computer gaming industry -- certainly the first from "true Africa," as Kirinya put it, smiling. By that he meant the broad swath of Africa south of the Sahara and north of South Africa, with its extended legacy of colonialism and apartheid. Every element of "iWarrior" -- the mechanics, the graphics, the music -- was created by Leti or outsourced to techies in East Africa or West Africa, Kirinya said.

In Silicon Valley, the collaborations that produced Apple, Yahoo, Google and other companies seem like the natural order of things. For the Leti guys, both 26, the journey has been more of an odyssey.

The son of an art professor, Tawia created fanciful comic books called "Sword of Sygos" in junior high and later learned to program on a clunky computer while reading Russ Walters' "Secret Guide to Computers." At 17, partnering with two friends, he helped create a distance-learning program for Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, which he would later attend. They were paid $700 and promptly bought a better computer.

Later, he was stunned when the local newspaper reported -- wrongly, Tawia thought -- that Africa's first 3-D computer game, called "Adventures of Nyangi," had been created 2,600 miles to the east by a Nairobi University student, Kirinya.

A Kenyan economist, James Shikwati, commented on Kirinya's achievement to Cox Newspapers at the time: "People will say, 'Kenyans, computer games? No, we don't make computer games.' He has shown that computer games are not a preserve of the Western world."

Through a tech blogger, Tawia contacted Kirinya and discovered a kindred spirit.

Kirinya, as a teen, was steeped in console games such as "Super Mario," "Streetfighter" and "Lara Croft," and augmented his formal education with computer books and manuals.

"I knew I wanted to make games," a pursuit many people considered frivolous, he said. "I felt all alone. There was a lot of alone time."

Leti has been nurtured by the philanthropic arm of San Francisco-based Meltwater Group, an Internet business services company, which in 2008 founded the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana. Not only did MEST pay for the ticket to bring Kirinya to Ghana, but it later awarded Leti $100,000 in seed financing.