A home altar shown on the official Kwanzaa web site. |
This
year represents the 50th anniversary of
the foundational call for the celebration of Kwanzaa. It was created in
1966 during the blossoming of a period of Black
Nationalism by Maulana Karenga, a
Black studies scholar and a leading Los Angeles militant.
Today
we are about half way through the African-American
cultural celebration. Beginning on December 26 and running through
January 1, candles are lit representing
values. Each of the values is given
a Swahili name. Today, day 4 is Nia or Purpose “to make
our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order
to restore our people to their traditional greatness.”
Karenga
was born Ron Everett in Parsonsburg, Maryland on July 14,1941 into the very large family—14 children of
a sharecropper and Baptist preacher, he came to Los Angeles in 1959 where he studied at
Los Angeles City College (LACC) and
the University of Southern California
(UCLA). As an undergraduate he was
active in the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) and the Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNICC) and was the first Black President of the Student Body.
It
was during this period he took the title Maulana, Swahili-Arabic for master
teacher and the name Karenga, Swahili for keeper of tradition.
After
the Watts Riots of 1965 the young graduate student was influenced by Malcom X in developing African-American Unity, cultural pride,
and a separatist militancy. He was involved in many activities and
organizations and was regarded as a rising
intellectual leader.
Maulana Karenga speaking to a Malcolm X birthday rally in Los Angeles in 1966, the year of the Kwanzaa proclamation |
Kwanzaa
was designed in instill those values in a community he feared was still too dominated by “alien” and white ideology
and religion. It was to “give Blacks an alternative to the
existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and
their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”
The name is derived from the Swahili for first fruit celebration, matunda ya kwanza.
Karenga
used Swahili as the ritual language of its operations because it is a pan-African language, the most widely spoken of Sub-Saharan African tongues.
But it is an East African language
as are the customs on which the celebration was based. The vast majority of African-Americans trace their lineage
to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and
West Africa, very culturally and linguistically distinct
from the east. Critics in the Black community charged that he could have taken
inspiration from instead from the West
African empires and kingdoms. But Karenga was a student of Swahili and the
east, and not of the slave trade or origins of his own people.
The
celebration, centered around lighting candles in the home over seven days,
obviously is borrowed from Jewish
Chanukah traditions, but Karenga has barely
acknowledged that obvious parallel.
Karenga
at first frankly hoped that his new celebration would supplant Christmas and New Years, both in his opinion instruments of White oppression. But the deep
connection of the Black community to the Church and to its celebrations stood in the way of the spread of
his new observance. Also, his allies in nationalism among Muslims, both followers of Malcom X’s traditional
Islam and the Nation of Islam—the Black
Muslims—also objected to Karenga’s non-theism
and hostility to religion.
After
1970 Karenga changed his tune and
now emphasizes that it is a secular
observation that does not conflict
with or contradict religious celebrations.
“Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion
or religious holiday,” he wrote in 1994.
With
that adaptation, Kwanzaa began to
spread rapidly. It was easy for families
to adopt for private observation. Most of those families also have a Christmas tree in the corner. Public
observations came to include many at major Black Churches.
Kwanzaa is now celebrated in many Black churches. |
Candles
are lit every night for the seven values.
Materials are available for study and reflection. Songs and poems have been written. The values are:
·
Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain
unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
·
Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create
for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
·
Ujima (Collective
Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and
make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems, and to solve them
together.
·
Ujamaa (Cooperative
Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other
businesses and to profit from them together.
·
Nia (Purpose):
To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in
order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
·
Kuumba (Creativity):
To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our
community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
·
Imani (Faith):
To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our
leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
The
final night concludes with a feast
and gift giving.
The
spread of the observance was aided, ironically, in no small part to
the attention given it in the mainstream,
white dominated media, especially local television news coverage in major
urban centers. The attention always
made the celebration seem much more
pervasive than it ever was.
Despite
claims to tens of millions of
participants across the globe made every year by Karenga on his official Kwanzaa web site, at its
heights in the mid-70’s it was actively observed by a small fraction of the Black community. Exact figures are hard to come by and wildly
exaggerated claims are made not only Karenga, but by sympathetic scholars. With the decline of Black Nationalism as a
movement and the founder’s many troubles—more
on that in a bit—participation has declined and leveled off. Estimates range from 12 to as low as 2
million participants in the first decade of the 21st Century. Market
research by the National Retail
Foundation in 2004 found that 1.6% of those surveyed planned to celebrate
Kwanzaa. Generalized to the US population as a whole, that would mean that
around 4.7 million people planned to celebrate Kwanzaa in that year.
And
some of them would be White. Introduction of Kwanzaa into school curricula as part of the general holiday observances has brought
it to many White children. In my own, overwhelmingly White faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism, which embraces diversity and often poaches traditions, Kwanzaa is often integrated with other winter holiday celebrations.
A
lot of other White folk, however, turn
purple in the face every time they hear about Kwanzaa. For them it is an affront, and more than that a direct
threat. Black Nationalism and
cultural pride evokes for them all of the old nightmares of slave
rebellions and rampaging Mau
Maus. It is also confabulated with the alleged war on Christmas by a shadowy Commie/liberal/Black
conspiracy. Every year the Right Wing talking heads froth at the mouth
over the observation. Which probably delights Karenga who remains a separatist at heart.
As
he promoted the holiday, Karenga also got involved
in one of the nastiest and most violent of feuds within the Black militant community. The group that he founded in 1965 and led—US \ Organization—became a rival of the
emerging Black Panther Party for
leadership of the nationalist movement on the West Coast. Egged on by an FBI COINTELPRO dis-information program, members of the two groups engaged in a gun fight on the UCLA campus in 1969 resulting in the death of two Panthers and the wounding
of on US member. Retaliatory shootings occurred across the country from months resulting
in two more deaths and the delight of
J. Edgar Hoover.
Maulana Karenga awaiting sentencing on kidnapping charges. |
The
Panther Party had better press and more adherents. Its members
and supporters naturally withdrew from any Kwanzaa celebrations.
But
the worst was yet to come. In 1971
Karenga was convicted of kidnapping
and sexually torturing Deborah Jones and Gail Davis. Karenga’s estranged wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified that she had participated in the abuse. Karenga claimed that the women were plotting against him and were part of
the COINTELPRO harassment. He denied claims of abuse.
He
was sentenced to ten years in prison and held at the California Men’s Colony until he was released with the support of high profile Black state politicians
and office holders. While he was in prison US fell apart and the reputation of
Kwanzaa was damaged. Karenga seldom
speaks about the conviction, except to note
that he was once a political
prisoner. The episode is left out of his auto-biography and on the Kwanzaa web page.
Dr. Karenga greets admirers at an event celebrating the First Day of Issuance ceremony for the U.S. Postal Service's first-ever Kwanzaa stamp in 1997. |
Upon
being released, Karenga tried unsuccessfully to resurrect US, and then devoted
himself to an organization promoting Kwanzaa.
He finished one PhD. at United
States International University (now Alliant
International University) and a second at UCLA. He is now the Chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State
University, Long Beach, the Director
of the Kawaida Institute for Pan African
Studies, and the author of
several books.
Despite
its ups and downs, Kwanzaa remains meaningful and is an inspiration for many in
the Black Community. And there is nothing wrong with that.
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