Let’s meet Tippi Benjamine Okanti Degri; she is the little French girl who spent the first ten years of her life growing up with the African wildlife!
Tippi was born to freelance wildlife photographers Sylvie Robert and Alain Degre; a couple who chose to relinquish their lives in France for the freedom of nature in Southern Africa. That passion for nature is exactly what they transmitted to their daughter. It is almost taken from a movie; her childhood is constantly compared to Rudyard Kipling’s hero in the Jungle Book.
But this is certainly someone life, Tippi’s life who is now a 23 year old young woman who became a celebrity in France after publishing “My Book of Africa” The bestselling novel tells little Tippi’s adventurous life growing up.
Tippi was born June 4, 1990 in the Deserts of Namibia and until the age of ten she traveled with her parents to the wilds of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe on a unique and extensively journey. During this time little Tippi had encounters with meerkats and the hidden mysteries of the cruel Kalahari, her beginnings were literally captured in the bush, dunes and swamps.
What is most remarkable is she developed a special love for the animals; anyone else would run scared of a leopard but not her; to Tippi it was her best friend. Little real life Mowgly found herself calling brother a five ton elephant named Abu. Traveling with her parents and being the only child could have been lonely but luckily she had animals to keep her company.
Growing up she did not only had a close encounter with animals but also with tribes people of the Kalahari who taught her how to survive on roots and berries and of course to speak their language; although she understood the animal language better than anyone, she would just look into their eyes and talked to them as if they would answer back!
Her parent’s decision to raise her in the wild is something they do not regret; they gave their daughter the most unforgettable experience of her life. Tippi and her parents moved to Paris where she found she did not have very much in common with the rest of the girls her age, her parents decided then she should be home-schooled and later became cinema student at la Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris.
Her love for Africa made her comeback and make six nature documentaries for the Discovery Channel. What an incredible journey her life is.
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