Although most of my stories are about wild animals and my adventures with them, this story is not. It’s about cultural misunderstandings, a lot of mistakes I made, and ultimately some of the experiences I had with people that I think also helped turn me into who I am today.
Landing at the Nairobi airport is super vivid in my mind because it was so different. I had never been to a Black country at all, so it was so interesting to me to land in a place where everyone was Black. I hadn’t taken the time to think about how that would feel to like, blend in.
And yet, at the same time, the staff was meeting us there with a sign, you know, that said “School for Field Studies” and they were able to know exactly who we were. And I walked over to the staff member and the person said, “Oh, excuse me, this is for an American study abroad program.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I know.” And they said, “No, no, no. Like, this isn’t for Kenyans. This is for American students.”
I was exactly the opposite of what they expected, kind of the story of my life. Like, ever since then, I’ve been professionally like, the opposite of what people expect. And I remember explaining like, no, no, like I’m Rae Wynn-Grant and I am American and I’m part of the study abroad program. And of course, the staff member was super apologetic. Not only did they not realize that a Black student was coming, they really didn’t have an understanding of the Black American identity and like how it could properly exist. And that was kind of the beginning of so many interesting conversations about race and identity on that trip…and some of them were pretty uncomfortable.
:: And I remember that he looked angry. I mean, he looked furious. “You said things are fine but, all the Black people, they’re dead in the water!” ::
I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show. A podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. I want to tell you my story and what it’s actually like to track bears in the Sierras, chase lemurs in Madagascar, live with lions in Tanzania, and do all of that as a Black female scientist. This is “Going Wild.”
Usually, folks ask me, you know, how did I get my start? Like, what was my first experience that put me on the track to being a wildlife ecologist? And I always, always, always every single time talk about when I was a junior in college and I studied abroad for a semester in Kenya. I saw my first wild animals, I interacted with them. It was amazing. But what I don’t usually have room to talk about is also how complicated that experience was for me mentally, intellectually, cross-culturally. It was fun and important and powerful and life-changing. And it was also super confusing, super complex. And my identity as a young Black American woman came into play in ways that I was pretty unprepared for.
It’s so hard for me to be accurate with my description of 2005 Kenya because I’ve gone back so many times since then. But 2005 Kenya was just, in retrospect, it was on the verge of becoming a big tech hub, but it wasn’t quite there yet. Today, if I landed in Kenya, I could text my parents to say I made it. In 2005, I remember writing a letter to them from the camp saying I’d made it. I got a response from my family at the end of the semester. Whereas today, you know, everything would be instant.
So the study abroad program was set up as a very intensive model. We did a normal amount of class, but a lot of time in the field, you know, a lot of game drives that took absolutely all day, you know, a lot of time, like out there with wildlife in the bush, which was awesome.
So most notably when it comes to free time, you know, this was pre-internet and in fact, like pre-electricity in this part of the country of Kenya, so our free time was not spent looking at screens and one of the wonderful things that we were able to do is get to know the staff.
They seemed like adults, you know, and adults are like in their thirties, you know, or older and all of that, but really the staff members were pretty young. I think the majority of them were in their twenties. Some of the staff members again were from Masaai communities and kind of bridged this line between a traditional lifestyle and a Western lifestyle. I came to realize that I had a lot of knowledge and information that the staff members specifically wanted to talk to me about, and it was definitely about the Black American experience.
I was the first Black student who had ever participated in this program. I was the first African American student that had ever come and that opened a world of opportunity for conversation. I remember having two different conversations with two different staff members, one of whom thought that there were no Black people in the United States. So they were curious like, how did I come to be just as a person? And then, you know, a different staff member who just came to me with so much pride, you know, saying, isn’t it just so wonderful, you know, you’re young, but you’re the first person in your family to be free, you know, and not a slave. I was totally blown away by that question. In fact, I didn’t even understand it at first, but I quickly realized, oh my gosh, a lot of these people have no idea about American history, about the timing of it, but in particular about the Black experience in the United States and the role of slavery.
I mean, I can think of tons of reasons why staff members from my study abroad program wouldn’t have this deep understanding of African American history. For one, the country of Kenya wasn’t really involved in the American slave trade anyway. And you know, when I think about how little I learned about African history as an American, I would imagine they didn’t have a lot of reason to learn about American history either.
It didn’t take too long for me to figure out that I should just sit down and just teach a full-on history lesson, which is exactly what I did.
I would say that different people had different understandings and different people had heard different things. So not everybody knew that slavery had happened in the United States. There were a couple of staff members who really thought that anyone Black in America had parents who had deliberately immigrated, you know, to the United States. And so that was, you know, a misconception that we had to kind of put down right away. And at the same time, explain that there are tons of Black folks in the United States who had parents who deliberately immigrated there. So, I was feeling like, well, how do I also, you know, explain all of this and then talk about, you know, the 100, 150 years after slavery, you know, of more brutality and you know, more racism and violence, but that it’s also possible to have a great life and that the Black community is thriving and doing our best and resilient and all of these things, it was hard. And I made some mistakes in doing that. I know that when I did start trying to explain that like, Oh, it’s okay today. I really overdid it. You know, I said, well, everything’s okay. And it’s very, very safe. And we all get treated really well. And so you should come to the United States sometime if you can and I think you’ll love it. And unfortunately, me selling that point ended up coming back to bite me a little later.
It was a day that I joined a couple of students in this five-kilometer jog to the nearest village. And a community member who had limited English skills, but really tried to make an effort to chat with us, came up. And I remember that he looked angry. I mean, he looked furious and he stormed up to me with my friends and yelled. And I, I mean, even before I could comprehend what he was saying, I was frightened, you know, I was really taken aback and he kind of pointed his finger and he said, “You said everything’s okay in America. You said things are fine, but all the black people they’re dead in the water!”
And I thought to myself, okay, what in the world is going on? There’s got to be, you know, a language barrier here. What is he talking about? But over and over he pointed in my face and he insisted, and he was angry: All the Black people in America are dead in the water.
And being completely honest, I shut him down. I said this isn’t true. I don’t know what news you’re getting or where you’re getting it from, but it’s impossible for what you’re saying to be true. That all the Black people in America right now are dead in some water, you know and I remember I was trying to make sense of it, like, well, okay, if we go back to the slave trade, you know, that was crossing a huge ocean and there was a lot of death that occurred in the water and, you know, maybe he heard something about that. I mean, I think the numbers are in the millions, you know, and, and I tried to bring that up and explain it. He said, “No. Today. Today they’re dead in the water.”
I let this go.
When this incident happened, it freaked me out, but I also let it go. I just, at that point, had been having all kinds of language barriers, cross-cultural misunderstandings, and I let it go. And didn’t think of it for another moment until weeks later, more than one month later, one of the staff members did the monthly run to Nairobi in order to pick up our mail. I had a big manila envelope from my parents and it was my very, very first mail, and I remember I ripped it open and there were a whole bunch of individual envelopes, a couple of postcards. My parents had sent a CD and also in that envelope was a TIME magazine and it was from either August or September, I can’t remember, of 2005. It was all about hurricane Katrina. And on the cover of TIME magazine, it literally showed desperate-looking Black people surrounded by water and utter devastation. It hit me all at once. And I said, oh my gosh. And I ripped open the TIME magazine and read that thousands of people, mostly Black had perished in this hurricane and that the response to that tragedy had been motivated by race because the people who’d been saved or one type of people and the people who had not been evacuated or who were unable to evacuate themselves were low-income African Americans in different parts of Louisiana and Texas.
That was exactly what that community member had been talking about that day. And I had shot him down and I had told him that that wasn’t true. And I had told all these staff members that things were great, that Black people didn’t get hurt because of racism anymore. Just this huge exaggeration of what was going on.
I don’t even know if I can explain it with words, you know, to be away from home for not too, too long, but to have a disaster like that happen and have no idea, you know, not a clue that it had happened… That was strange.
I was lonely. Receiving that news definitely made some feelings of loneliness surface. You know, feelings of isolation surface, it kind of the reality of where I was and how far away and how much I didn’t know and how disconnected I was definitely surfaced. And that was uncomfortable and scary and made me feel pretty sad.
And it was on me to really fess up. To really tell everyone how wrong I was. To show them the truth, you know, through this magazine. I brought the magazine to the village and I sat with a number of people and almost nobody could speak any English. And at that point, my Swahili was pretty poor. And I paged through the magazine and I explained, and one of the staff members helped me to translate. And I explained that, yeah, actually there had been a big hurricane, a lot of people died even though they shouldn’t have, and that it was Black folks that died because of racism.
And I admitted that I was completely wrong, that I had led them to believe something that wasn’t true, and that I was sorry. And that community member who had yelled at me that day, who had pointed his finger in my face was extremely forgiving, you know? And he said, “We just wanted to support you. You know, we just wanted you to explain this so we could help you grieve because those are your people who are dead. You know, those are your people that are hurting. This is your community that needs help.” He offered, you know, like how can we pay a tribute essentially to all those people that died? And it was really, really special. And I cried and that was definitely the first, but not the last time that I cried over something so moving that the Masaai folks did for me and cared about, even though we were so different and we misunderstood each other so much.
It’s so many years later, and yet these stories from these experiences that I had in Kenya way back then still resonate and are still so important. I think it’s a lot because it was my first time truly experiencing an African American identity. Traveling to a part of Africa allowed me to realize that my Black experience and my Black identity and my Black history is wildly different from the people that I was with, which can be wildly different than other groups of Black folks. And it all, it seems so simple when I say it today. I mean, duh, obviously, you know, not every Black person has a singular experience, but I really didn’t know that.
As I was able to have, you know, a whole bunch of experiences with diversity, seeing diversity within Blackness, being a part of it, teaching and being taught. It made me a more receptive, more compassionate, a more open-minded person. And yet it was not the biggest misunderstanding that I had while I was a student on this program. There was something else that happened that was so incredibly bizarre that still stays with me to this day in a way that always makes me think, “What if…?” That story is coming next week.
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This episode of “Going Wild” was hosted and written by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. Production by Rachel Aronoff, Danielle Broza, Nathan Tobey, and Great Feeling Studios. Editing by Jakob Lewis. Sound design by Cariad Harmon.
Danielle Broza is the Digital Lead and Fred Kaufman is the Executive Producer for Nature.
Art for this podcast was created by Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell.
Special thanks to Amanda Schmidt, Blanche Robertson, Jayne Lisi, Chelsey Saatkamp, Natasha Padilla, and Karen Ho.
“Going Wild” is a new podcast by PBS Nature. Nature is an award-winning series created by the WNET Group and made possible by all of you. Funding for this podcast was provided by grants from the Anderson Family Charitable Fund and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
