Rae Wynn-Grant - Grief and Gratitude in Maasailand

 

I was 19 years old and a junior in college when I embarked upon a life changing study abroad opportunity. At that point in my life, pretty much all of my family and friends were curious why I would choose something like this. But in retrospect, it all made sense. I was searching for some things. 

 

For one, I needed a connection to nature. I was a bona fide city girl and had essentially never been outside. Not only that, I was studying environmental science and had only learned about the outdoors through a textbook or in my classroom. I really needed my real experience in nature. This study abroad program would do just that. It was a wildlife management program in southern Kenya. We would be living in the bush, studying wild animals in their natural habitat and basically camping for a full semester. I was pumped.

 

The second thing, is that like many African Americans coming of age, I felt like I needed a connection to the African continent. I imagined that my ancestry stemmed from West Africa somewhere, but I figured spending time in East Africa would give me that ancestral connection I was looking for. I couldn't wait. And so, before I knew it, I was there. 

 

As soon as my plane landed, I was struck by two things. The first one was kind of a bummer. As it turned out, I was the only Black student in the program and the only Black student they had ever had in the program. [audience laughter] It seemed like my identity was going to be more of an issue in Africa than it was in the US. And the second thing was awesome. It was the wildlife.

 

As soon as our Jeep left the airport in the city of Nairobi and started driving into the bush, I was struck by the change in scenery, and I saw my first ever wild animal. Now, it wasn't one of those iconic African species like an elephant or a giraffe. It was a marabou stork. You don't read about those in textbooks. But marabou storks are five or six feet tall with a 12-foot wingspan. They walk along the landscape altogether like dinosaurs. I saw them and was transfixed. I knew that I had made the right choice in a study abroad program and also in a career studying wildlife. 

 

The other cool thing about the program was that it was situated within a Maasai community. These were people who chose to live a traditional tribal lifestyle, and they really stuck to it. I was thrilled, because I had so many questions for them, and I figured that our skin color could at least bridge that cultural gap. 

 

We were really, really different. So, it took a lot of time for me to make those friendships, but eventually I did. Some of the Maasai warriors were my age. Apparently, they had been waiting for a Black person to come on this program. Most of their questions for me were about the Black experience in America. They had heard these rumors about slavery, the way that Black people had ended up in this country. Before I knew it, we were spending days and days, weeks and weeks with me giving them lessons on African-American history. It was hard. It's a violent, oppressive history. I was telling tales of torture and bondage. It got to be pretty uncomfortable.

 

After a while, I decided, you know what, I think I'm painting the wrong picture here of America, because slavery is over and Black people have civil rights now. We're free. Even look at me. I'm a young Black woman pursuing higher education, traveling around the world. I insisted to them that actually, things were great. 

 

One day, one of the warriors that I had grown to know, named Saroony, came rushing to me in the field as I was collecting data on zebras. He had a look of terror in his eyes. And instead of embracing me with the normal hug, he shouted at me when he was still far away, “All of your people, they're dead in the water.” I didn't understand what he was saying, and so I asked again. He seemed a little bit angry with me. "You told us that everything was okay, but your people are dead." 

 

I was terrified, because I didn't know what could be going on. We were completely cut off. This was pre-internet, pre-cell phone Kenya and it was going to be nearly impossible for me to understand this news. I told him that he must have misunderstood something. Maybe there was some news lost in translation, or he got word of some weird tabloid story that was totally incorrect. I sent him back to the village with the message that this couldn't be true and everything was fine. 

 

The way we got our news from home was through bimonthly mail runs to Nairobi. And so, a few weeks went by until I could figure out what he was talking about. As my white classmates were opening their care packages of candy and new CDs to listen to, my parents had sent me Time magazine. It was September of 2005, and Hurricane Katrina had just hit. The cover of the Time magazine showed a flooded city and bodies floating in the water. 

 

Almost 2,000 people drowned in that hurricane, almost all of them the Black residents of New Orleans. I was shocked. I was ashamed of my country and I was ashamed of myself for misleading this entire group of people who depended on me. Of course, I had come into some kind of racial consciousness, but it took a national crisis like that for me to understand the scale and the magnitude of the impact of racism. I took the magazine into the village and I passed it around, doing my best to translate the news.

 

When I got to Saroony, I began to cry. He held me and said, my tears were exactly what was missing that day in the field, that the village had already cried for me and with me and that they were here. The next baby to be born in that village, they would name Katrina after the hurricane. 

 

Nine years later, after a number of wildlife experiences in East Africa, I was headed back to Maasailand. This time, the roles were reversed. I was an instructor for a study abroad program for undergrads. In about a decade, I had become an expert in African wildlife ecology. This was my chance to show my chops and to get some skills in teaching. I couldn't wait. 

 

I think about my grandfathers a lot. I have the privilege of having been very close to them throughout my childhood and even into adulthood. And so, it's easy for me to remember the day that my paternal grandfather, George, died. January 26th, 2014. It was the same day that I was to leave for Kenya to teach this course. All of a sudden, something that seemed so important to me, like my career coming full circle was the least important thing in the world. But it was too late to cancel. 

 

After an emotional conversation with my family, we concluded that I needn't halt my life because of a death. My grandfather had known how much I loved him. And so, with a heavy heart, I left for Kenya, chaperoned 12 undergraduates through Amsterdam successfully [audience laughter] and began the course.

 

All was well when we landed. I had the wonderful opportunity to watch my students experience the same thing that I had. As we left the airport in Nairobi and drove into the bush, their jaws dropped and their eyes widened at seeing their first African wildlife. And yes, it was a marabou stork, okay? They're very prevalent. [laughs]

 

The course went on without a hitch. One particularly exhausting day, I found myself sitting with the chief of the village, a Maasai man who I had grown to know over the years. He noticed that I was really fatigued and found a way to slip in some personal questions. "Where is your mind?" he asked. I opened my mouth to answer. And instead of words coming out, tears just started flowing. I admitted to him that I was grieving the loss of my grandfather and I was feeling selfish that I had chosen a professional opportunity over the ability to honor his legacy. The chief looked really confused. "Why can't you honor him?" he asked. 

 

I explained as the expert that in America, we usually do this thing where all the family and the friends get together when a person dies, and we view their body and then we talk a lot about the life they led and we say some prayers and then we bury them in the ground and walk away. [audience laughter] He nodded his head and said, “Yeah. Right. We do that in Kenya too.” [audience laughter] He insisted that my problem was indeed one of selfishness. Not that I had chosen the field course over the funeral, but that I hadn't figured out a way to honor my grandfather independently. "Let us help you," he said. "We'll bury him here." 

 

The next morning, I awoke hours before normal, long before my students. I walked in the pre-dawn darkness to the road. I met the chief, his wives and two elders from the village. They adorned me in traditional Maasai red cloth, and wiped red paint on my cheeks and my forehead. I walked with them in silence as they chanted in the Maa language down the road until we stopped at a giant over 1,000-year-old baobab tree. One of the elders got down and used his hands to dig a small hole at the base of the tree, and I was instructed to kneel.

 

As soon as my knees hit the ground, I started crying again and they tilted my head, so that my tears fell into the soil. In English, the chief said, "You exist because your grandfather existed. Your tears are a part of him and we'll bury them." I finished crying after some time and they patted the earth back over the hole. Altogether, everyone lifted me back onto my feet. When I was standing, I felt taller and lighter and I felt forgiven. 

 

We turned, and this time, we all walked in silence back up the road. We arrived back at camp as the sun was coming up. I thanked the chief, his wives and the two elders. I left to teach my course for the day. Before my time was over in Kenya, a baby boy was born in the village, and I would learn that they named him George, after my grandfather.