A Kenyan name comes first in a list of 21 board members of a special organ of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
That Kenyan is Brian Afande, a former deejay who has since immersed himself in technology, and the WEF organ is called the Global Future Council on the Future of Metaverse.
The metaverse is a virtual world where people can exist in forms of their choosing, do business, and play games, among other activities.
Brian, 43, would probably not have been there if it weren’t for the September 21, 2013 Westgate terror attack that killed 67.
A close shave saw him quit his managerial job at shoe firm Converse then went on a journey of rebirth and to “give back to the community,” which drove him to the world of extended reality.
Extended reality is the space where people talk about virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. Black Rhino VR, a company Brian co-founded, is among the first in Africa to be registered to play in that space.
Some of the magic that Brian illustrates to us at his office in Westlands, Nairobi, involves focusing a phone camera on an illustration in a book. Somehow, the phone relays a three-dimensional coloured image on its screen.
Time seems to pass quickly as he narrates his rise from an orphaned boy from Madaraka Estate to a tech entrepreneur bagging deals with firms like Al Jazeera, Oculus, Safaricom, among others.
So, what happened at Westgate?
He recalls that as people were being butchered, he spent six hours hidden behind a wall unit. At some point, a terrorist leaned against that unit as he shot indiscriminately.
“I had an intimate encounter with the terrorist because I was hiding behind a wall unit and the terrorist was leaning on it,” adds Brian. “He has his gun, he’s shooting guys, leaning on this wall unit; and I’m behind there. I’m counting the [cartridges] on the floor. I can hear him click kama ameudhika [in disgust].”
Why didn’t he spot him?
“First, I think he was preoccupied. Second, I feel like he was distracted spiritually,” Brian says.
He goes on: “It was pin-drop silence. You could not hear any other human being; just gunshots. When I look back, I think … I was in the presence of an angel.”
What makes him believe that there was divine intervention on the day of the attack is the fact that when police from the elite Recce Squad entered the mall, they did not take more than 15 minutes to point out that he was there.
When this happened, he was the brand manager and the retail portfolio manager at Converse.
“On that eventful day, I was going to Westgate because we had two stores there. I was there only for about 20 or 30 minutes, and then the terrorists came in,” he says.
Luckily, none of the Converse staff were killed.
Spirituality is another realm of reality that unveils itself when you interact with Brian, as he credits his faith for bringing him this far.
“My journey for starting Black Rhino is a faith-based journey,” he says. “Westgate is really when my life began, and a lot of the work that I do is really based on this sort of philosophy and my Christian beliefs that God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.”
How did he get to quit his job? He says he handed over his resignation in January 2014 and opted to stay jobless by choice.
Before joining Converse, he had started off as a deejay, plying his trade as “DJ Mr French” in the Code Red group. Some of his works aired on Capital FM and NTV. He was part of the group that set up Black Star Entertainment.
“I believe in seasons in life, there’s a reason for every season. And I knew my season at Converse was over. But as it culminated in surviving that terrorist attack, I knew that this season was over, and that’s why I transitioned.”
The most trying thing about quitting one’s job is that a person quickly finds themselves in the pit of expenses without money to fill it. How did it affect Brian?
“When I resigned from Converse, I was still marketable. I was approached by several companies. One of them was even paying me four times more than what Converse was paying me,” he recalls.
At that time, his path crossed with that of Michael Ilako, a film company owner who was looking for a business partner. Mr Ilako dropped out of medical school at the third year to pursue filmmaking.
They were racking their brains on the type of business to venture into when they read that Facebook had acquired a virtual reality (VR) company for $2.3 billion (Sh297.8 billion).
“I asked myself: Why would Facebook acquire a VR company?” Recalls Brian. “I remember us vividly asking ourselves: what is this technology? And then we were told it was film technology—and he was a filmmaker—and for me, it was also about technology and computing power, and I had a background in IT. So, we realised that because both of us had different yet complementary backgrounds, we decided to read more about VR.”
Brian Afande, CEO of BlackRhino VR demonstrates the operations of the Mediar Application, an Augmented Reality cloud editor and publishing platform that transforms static images into dynamic ones, during an interview at their offices in Westlands.
Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group
With that, Black Rhino VR began. At the start, jobs were few and far between. Their early clients were hotels, before Safaricom gave them a big-money contract to develop a 360-video.
“This is the first big paycheque we ever got,” he says.
There were few gigs afterwards, and at some point they almost closed the company, but a series of “miraculous” developments happened to see the company where it is today.
“It is a global and a local company. We’ve worked with clients in the States, in Europe, in Africa in maybe over 12 African countries,” says Brian.
Most of the things Brian and his team are doing are self-taught, and he believes in living various versions of one’s life in one lifetime.
Their best times in business, Brian says, were during the Covid-19 years.
“Covid-19 was the unexpected catalyst of technology,” he says, recalling the many assignments the company was sent to execute by firms that couldn’t travel to various parts of the world.
“We did a lot of work as people locked themselves in.”
Black Rhino VR is one of nine companies that recently beat numerous other entries to be part of a Safaricom incubation programme called Spark Accelerator. Among the nine are saving platform Chumz, social commerce platform Chpter, human resource platform Faidi HR, business automation provider Churpy, and chamas record platform Nobuk.
Black Rhino applied to the Spark Accelerator based on its MediAR platform, which allows people to create augmented reality content without coding knowledge.
At the Global Future Council on the Future of Metaverse, Brian and the other board members from across the globe are concerned with the principles and frameworks needed to effectively govern the Metaverse safely and inclusively.
A visit to Black Rhino VR’s office isn’t complete before Brian gets you to wear a virtual reality headset where you get to immerse yourself in a different, immersive world.
