Keena Roberts’ Wild Life: Dispatches from a Childhood of Baboons and Button-Downs

Review by Lauren D. Woods

It’s difficult to pick up Keena Roberts’ Wild Life: Dispatches from a Childhood of Baboons and Button-Downs and not expect to read flavors of Mean Girls. After all, Roberts’ memoir centers on a white American girl, home-schooled in Africa, who struggles to fit into modern American life. But despite the surface similarities, Wild Life is a different beast altogether. And long before Mean Girls came to theaters in 2004, Roberts was living the real thing, facing off against giant snakes and patrolling for elephants and other wildlife.

A daughter of two American primatologists, Keena, along with her sister Lucy, grew up in remote research sites, first in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, and then at a camp in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where most of her childhood, and most of the book, takes place. While other American girls were joining girl scouts and sports teams, Keena lived in a tent and learned to track and watch out for wild animals, like elephants, leopards, hippos, impala, kudu, and even lions. Except, that is, whenever her parents needed to return to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania and apply for new grants, and Keena and her sister would live regular suburban American lives, until it was time to move again.

In the memoir, Roberts is a huge advocate of her parents’ work, which included research into how baboons’ brains, and ultimately human brains, which are both wired to keep track of complex relationships, evolved in the way they did. One takeaway from Wild Life is that we aren’t so different from the baboons. The people who surround us, and the environments we live in, do indeed shape our brains and minds and hearts. Why is Keena at the end of the book the way she is, if not for the particular cast of people around her, the challenging environments she found throughout her childhood, and the survival skills she had to build up as a result? Perhaps that’s what’s most relatable about Wild Life: what are we, if not also products of our environment, shaped by the things we must learn in order to survive?

Inspired by her early life in Botswana and the poor healthcare offered to many closest to her, Roberts has worked for more than a decade in global health. She graduated from Harvard and Johns Hopkins and now works in international market research, focused on global health. Undoubtedly, her early experiences led her to pursue the career she did. This is her debut book.

The memoir stretches from Keena’s toddlerhood to the beginning of her college career, from a confident young girl who is teased and bullied by her American peers and therefore learns to be insecure, before finally coming full circle, until she is able to embrace her true self again. And it works, because the author’s exploration of identity is woven throughout, from a meandering beginning to one terrifying moment near the end.

The heart of the story is Botswana, in Baboon Camp, as she calls it, the isolated site in Okavango Delta where Keena’s family lived off and on throughout her childhood, and where her parents observed baboon relationships for hours on end. This led to a highly unusual childhood for Roberts and her sister Lucy, who both grew up tracking animals, reading a lot, and creating their own entertainment.

The story meanders at first, with anecdotes about Keena’s run-ins with wildlife. Although the book gives roughly equal weight to chapters set in Botswana or Kenya and America, Botswana carries the heart of the story. When Keena lives in Philadelphia, Botswana dominates her thoughts. But at home in Baboon Camp, she seems to forget America.

Keena’s parents play a constant, positive, if occasionally hands-off role. They place great faith in Keena to make her way, even at a young age. By contrast, Roberts’ peers treat her in Philadelphia as a clueless child, lacking in proper socialization.

Roberts’ prose is rich and captivating. It’s easy to see what drew her to life in Baboon Camp. She writes, “The air was crisp and cold and I stared up into a stark blue sky, watching long-tailed shrikes and brightly colored bee-eaters swoop between the acacia trees along the banks of the river, catching flies in elaborate loops.” It’s the beauty and the wilderness of the place, the sense of adventure, that captivates her. No day is like any other.

Roberts’ admiration for the environment around her is evident. She says her mother used to tell her that her greatest talent was observation, implying that her daughter’s power comes from spotting animals far away and keeping everyone safe. This talent is also evident in her writing, and much of what makes her prose so precise and visually striking.

If the memoir starts out slowly, it soon picks up speed as Roberts careens repeatedly between Botswana and Philadelphia, unsure who she really is. Is she the brave girl in Botswana, navigating waters filled with dangerous hippos alone? Is she like the brave fantasy characters she reads about? Or is she the girl who repeatedly fails to learn the social codes of her American peers? The girl so out of touch with ‘90s pop culture, that when classmates are discussing favorite bands, she protests in confusion that no one makes jam from pearls?

Roberts lays her childhood anxieties bare. Her classmates wonder if she knows how to wear a dress. Boys prank call her and ask her if she speaks African, and eats bugs. A girl—who we learn from the Acknowledgements is based on a compilation of real-life mean girls—taunts Roberts repeatedly and calls her monkey girl.

Some of the book’s most compelling moments are Roberts’ descriptions of America— never her permanent home until the end of high school. “When our English teacher said we could have class outside, my classmates squealed and fussed about having to sit on the grass where there might be bugs and dirt. Like most Americans I knew, they acted like they were at war with nature. Instead of enjoying the seasons, even when they were unpleasant, they constantly complained about the weather and aggressively climate-controlled everything from their cars to their patios.” In Botswana, by contrast, Keena endured great discomfort, including seasons so hot, she could only sleep after a cold shower, but made the best of things.

But Roberts is careful not to dwell excessively on those moments, or to assert that she has any claim to understanding “real” Botswana, beyond her experience in Baboon Camp. Her camp, as she notes, is a relative paradise, isolated geographically from Botswana’s major cities and urban problems like poverty and disease.

Some of the Botswanan characters received little attention in the memoir, but that was also a reflection of Keena's life in Botswana. I wanted to get to know them better, like Mokupi, who worked for Keena’s family in Botswana. Although cultural and age differences prevented Keena from drawing closer to Mokupi and his brother Mpitsang—she was the young, white daughter of their American employers—she and Mokupi enjoyed poignant moments together: sitting under a tree, watching baboons, drawing, and talking about animals that cannot be found in America. And as Keena grows older and returns to Botswana while on a college break, she is struck by the rest of Botswana—the people she never met in isolated Baboon Camp and the health crises she never fully appreciated before—particularly the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has swept Botswana.

Still, the real Keena comes most alive in Baboon camp, in moments like these, where she proclaims, “I loved the sounds of the birds, the dust beneath my feet, and the buzzing, electric sense of excitement that anything could happen at any time. I didn’t want to know what my next week, day, or hour looked like; I wanted to feel all the time like I felt when I prowled around the outside edges of camp, like a coiled spring ready to jump at whatever terrifying or amazing thing the world threw my way next.” Here, in the unknown, where others might long for security and stability, Keena is most herself.

This is why it feels like a tragedy when finally, in high school, Keena decides that in order to fit in, she has to put away the Botswana pieces of herself—starting with ridding her Philadelphia bedroom of anything related to her life in Botswana. Keena declares afterward that her room felt empty and dead, and a part of her felt dead too—American Keena was just a shell of her real self. Like any good coming of age story, the hero of the story has to deny, and then come to terms with who she is and what she’s made of. And true to form, Keena lets herself become lesser than she is, getting new clothes and starting to copy the girls around her, to fit in with people who had repeatedly put her down.

Here Roberts’ memoir is perhaps the most relatable. Who, after all, hasn’t felt on top of the world in one environment of immense familiarity, only to find oneself a completely different person in another context? But aren’t I smart, and funny and fierce, and confident? she seems to ask herself. What happened? And how easy it is, for Keena, thrown into this other environment, while still young, before she comes to terms with her own power, to think, Which one is the real me?

Wild Life is available for purchase now. Get a copy from local bookstores like Politics and Prose or Arlington’s One More Page Books, or from Amazon.com

And glimpse a bit of Roberts’ story by reading this excerpt from the book and also this personal essay she wrote about how living with baboons prepared her for living through high school.

Keena Roberts graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology and African studies. She was deeply affected by the impact the HIV/AIDS epidemic had on Botswana when she lived there; at Harvard, she studied Botswana’s response to the epidemic. After graduation, she spent two years working in the U.S. House of Representatives on issues relating to foreign affairs and health policy, and later earned a dual Masters from Johns Hopkins University in International Public Health and Development Economics. Most recently she has worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in HIV/AIDS and LGBT health policy, for a government contractor on implementation of the Affordable Care Act in the United States, and she now works for an international market research company examining consumer health in more than 100 countries around the world.             

Lauren Woods is a DC-area based writer. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Wasafiri, The Offing, The Washington Post, and others.