Post #24: Memories from Nisa: The Life and Words of a Kung! Woman”.

 Word Count: 361

Nisa was a woman from southern Africa in the Kalahari Desert. She is from the King people, or a group of nomads. Her experienced were recorded through an American anthropologist named Marjorie Shostak. Shostak learned the language and then began to interview many Kung woman but not a singular person to fiate on until she met Nisa. Many of the women she met had problems communicating with her except for Nisa. Nisa's life is described in detail, from her childhood experiences growing up in a hunter-gatherer society to her experiences as a wife and mother. Nisa's story provides a window into the daily life of the !Kung people, including their social customs, beliefs, and values. With the help of Shostak, Nisa was bale to get her stories shared in the form of her works, “Nisa: The Life and Words of a Kung! Woman”.

"It's hard to tell about these things, because they happened so long ago, and because we had no writing to record them. We have only our memories and our words to tell the stories. But maybe that is enough, because our words have been passed down from generation to generation, and they have kept us connected to each other and to our past."

This quote reflects Nisa's perspective on the importance of oral tradition and storytelling in Kung society, as well as the challenges of remembering and preserving the details of her life and the lives of her ancestors.

Nias’s life is full of the hardships of her people as well as her own personal struggles in the tribe. Her early childhood was very harsh from her interactions with her father. Her father was a very strict man who often was the one coming to deal with Nisa’s incessant crying all the time. His methods were cruel and he seemed to have a lack of patience. Even through all her problems with her family from her grandmother and siblings, she had even more trouble around marriage. Nisa’s experience with marriage was horrendous and the things she was told in regard to approaching her husband as well as sex, were very cold-feeling and hard to understand all at once.