The digital Battle of Adwa: Kanessa Muluneh’s quest for Africa’s gaming sovereignty

​When the parents of three-year-old Kanessa Muluneh fled the civil war in Ethiopia for the Netherlands, they carried with them the heavy, fragmented narrative of a homeland defined by struggle.

Decades later, Muluneh returned to Addis Ababa in her late 20s on a “spiritual journey”, only to discover a reality the Western lens, and even her own immigrant parents, had missed. She found an Africa that was no longer waiting to be saved but was ready to play.

​Today, Muluneh is the founder of Nyle Investment Groupand the architect behind Rise of Fearless, a battle royale game that seeks to do for African gaming what Black Panther did for cinema. But this isn’t just about entertainment.

It is a high-stakes experiment in Web3 sovereignty, cultural preservation, and infrastructure building on a continent where the ping is high, but the potential is higher.

​From TikTok lessons to digital armies

​The road to Rise of Fearless didn’t start in a high-tech lab; it started on TikTok. To reclaim her “blurry” mother tongue, Muluneh began posting casual videos to practise the language with Ethiopians back home.

What began as “silly” clips about the weather quickly pivoted when her growing audience asked a pointed question: “Can you teach us about NFTs and crypto?”

Kanessa Muluneh

​Muluneh saw it initially as a topic of conversation, not a business venture, but she began hosting live sessions in her native language to explain how NFTs worked. The resulting education-first NFT project sold out almost instantly. Rather than simply moving on, the community demanded that the funds be used to build something for the country.

After realising the logistical nightmares of building a physical marketplace like Amazon, Muluneh turned to the one medium that ignores borders and thrives on a massive youth population: gaming.

​For her narrative engine, Muluneh bypassed generic fantasy tropes and reached for the Battle of Adwa, the 1896 victory where Ethiopian forces defeated Italian invaders, ensuring the nation remained uncolonised. This historical anchor has a major impact on the current African economy and identity.

“It became more of a history class first before it turned into a game,” Muluneh explains, noting that many in the younger generation weren’t even aware of the story’s depth.

However, translating 19th-century resistance into a 21st-century battle royale requires a “diplomatic” touch. To avoid reigniting old political fires, the game uses symbolic power rather than literal, one-on-one reenactments.

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​The battlefield is a digital tapestry of the continent: from the trees to the architecture and the entire landscape. Authenticity is found in the visual representation: characters don’t just have generic skin tones; they reflect the diverse complexions of Africa, adorned with afros, rastas, and braids.

“It’s impossible to lose authenticity in terms of the visual aspects,” she asserts.

​Web3: The only bridge across 54 borders

​While global critics often dismiss Web3 as a niche for speculators, Muluneh views it as a pragmatic necessity for African survival. In a continent where financial systems are fragmented, and Stripe or PayPal are often non-existent, blockchain provides the only universal rail for cross-border trading.

“Africa is not financially connected,” Muluneh notes. “There is nothing besides crypto that can make it happen.” She argues that if used wisely, blockchain puts Africa on an equal scale with the West for the first time in history.

Yet, she remains a realist about the current landscape. The rise of Fearless isn’t chasing total decentralisation; the infrastructure and regulations simply aren’t ready, and some countries still restrict its use.

​Instead, the project uses a hybrid model, utilising centralised servers in South Africa and Dubai to solve the ping problem and server latency for players on low-end Android devices. This soft landing approach avoids large upfront purchases that wouldn’t work in the African market, focusing instead on long-term education.

​The biggest hurdle to competing with titles like Call of Duty isn’t just a lack of capital but a lack of infrastructure and “ecosystem knowledge”. While the U.S. gaming industry enjoys a deep supply chain of lawyers, IP specialists, and data centre consultants, African studios often hit a brick wall alone.

​Muluneh’s vision for success isn’t just making a global hit; it’s building the blueprint. “I would like to create an industry, not just this game,” she says. This means documenting the journey so it is “easily copyable” for the next generation of African developers. She believes that once there is internal competition, quality will rise naturally across the continent.

​She isn’t interested in fighting Fortnite head-on with multi-million-dollar budgets. Instead, she is building a “separate league” entirely, one where African players see themselves, trade with each other, and own their digital destiny.

​In the next five years, the goal is for Rise of Fearless to become the biggest game in the region. To get there, Muluneh is unapologetic about importing knowledge from the U.S. to accelerate local growth, rather than wasting decades reinventing the wheel.

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​For Kanessa Muluneh, the game is a Trojan horse for a much larger mission: restoring trust through the transparency of the blockchain. In the world of Rise of Fearless, the ultimate victory isn’t the last player standing, but the birth of a sustainable, self-reliant African gaming empire that can finally write its own history on its own terms.

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