Kali’s Story
Live to Survive
Setting: 80,000 BC 10-30,000 people (from 2,000 at 150,000 BC)
Main points:
death in childbirth
telling time
shared resources
common history
Kali, the earliest of my mothers that I know anything about. Like Eva, the Great Mother, Kali is also your mother.
Kali lived 80,000 ago in territory now known as Ethiopia. Kali survived her birth as did her mother Imani who was only 14 years old.
Most women died in childbirth. Half the tribe died by age 15. All people were in danger. Daily life was a struggle for survival. They had to keep moving, wandering, foraging. There were some 20,000 homo sapiens at that time. While various groupings came across each other on their travels, they could not manage more than 20 adults in a survival unit.
When Kali and her mother survived childbirth, Kali’s village danced and sang songs of joy—the women clasping arms in the birthing circle.
Kali’s grandmother Asha had also survived Imani’s birth but she was very old at 30 and had died two months ago—not able to witness the birth of her grandchild.
Nonetheless, Kali had a mother Imani, who had a mother Asha, who had a mother Ode who had a mother Kalifa…
The women shared stories about the pain of carrying a child in womb only to have the infant and mother both die in the crisis of labor. Death was not a surprise as the entire life of the village people was a struggle to survive to the next day.
They did not expect to live beyond 20, but they loved each other, loved their mothers, loved their children. Imani had yearned for the touch of her lover, howled in the ecstasy of orgasm, cherished the growing child in her womb—even as she moaned at the pains of carrying her womb’s extra weight, and screamed when giving birth to Kali—as if death was at her door. She and all her sister friends loved deeply and grieved routinely at the loss of life around them.
Family stories recounted that their line was descended from the wise woman of Kenya called EVA who had lived through the Big death.
Imani had done the work of many lifetimes. She was a people’s teacher, what would later be called a Jaliyaa. From age 3 she learned to speak the language of her people—she learned language by recounting the stories of her mothers—
she made up a song to help her and her people remember their mothers. Starting with herself, she would recite,
I am Imani the daughter of
Asha who is the daughter of
Ode who is the daughter of
Kalifa
Bahati
Amare
Jafari
She ended the recitation with Eva—
— Eva, the wise woman of Kenya who had lived through the Big death
In the language of her people, Asha expressed herself with a chorus something like this:
“She lived! She lived! She lived and so lived her daughter and her daughter’s daughters.
“May she never go hungry. May she never thirst.
“Many she live to lead us forward on our journey of life!
The fact of the matter is that while Imani recited 10 generations, it had already been 3,000 generations since the Big Death, when only 2000 homo sapiens survived extinction.
Despite hardship and trauma, Kali thrived and carried on her mother’s work of remembering as she understood it—and then visioning.
As Kali grew, she and her sisters discovered TIME—they learned to tell the past from the future.
How? They learned to tell the timing of their bleeding by the turning of the moon. They counted the nights between their bleedings, and in her lifetime they figured out that sex was the beginning of pregnancy. If they just planned their times of pleasure and organized their villages to oppose unwanted advances—they would not always be pregnant. They learned that they did not always have to carry babies in their bellies and on their backs.
Kali was what I call an Artifex (creator, producer, mastermind). As a teacher, she led her tribe to develop tools for building, and invent shelters they could carry. Perhaps most important they began to create agreements to increase survival, they could lead their people forward faster on the great migration to survival and life!
Kali’s grand-daughter, Semi, lived, learned from her mothers and courageously lead one of the many treks across the Gate of Grief at Bab-el-Mandeb—out of Africa into what is now Yemen. When she arrived, alive and capable of conceiving a child of her own, Semi gathered her tribal sisters in the Women’s circle, cried, chanted, carried out her grieving rituals and taught the young women of her tribe how to tell time.
Then she recited,
I am Semi, daughter of Magnus, daughter of Kali, daughter of Imani the daughter of
Asha who is the daughter of
Ode who is the daughter of
Kalifa
Bahati
Amare
Jafari
the story always ended with Eva—
— Eva, the wise woman of Kenya who had lived through the Big death
“She lived! She lived! She lived and so lived her daughter and her daughter’s daughters.
“May she never go hungry. May she never thirst.
“Many she live to lead us forward on our journey of life!