Kwanzaa celebration marks its 50th anniversary
27th December 2016 · 0 Comments
Fifty years ago, amid the rise of the Black Power Movement and a renewed sense of cultural awareness, people of African descent began to observe an African-centered tradition that empowered, ennobled and celebrated them.
Kwanzaa is a week-long celebration held in the United States and in other nations of the Western African diaspora in the Americas. The celebration honors African heritage in African-American culture, and is observed from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a feast and gift-giving, Kwanzaa has seven core principles (Nguzo Saba). It was created by Maulana Karenga and was first celebrated in 1966–67.
Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa in 1966, as the first specifically African-American holiday, (but see also Juneteenth). According to Karenga, the name Kwanzaa derives from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, meaning “first fruits of the harvest,” although a more conventional translation would simply be “first fruits.” The choice of Swahili, an East African language, reflects its status as a symbol of Pan-Africanism, especially in the 1960s, although most of the Atlantic slave trade that brought African people to America originated in West Africa.
Kwanzaa is a celebration that has its roots in the Black Nationalist Movement of the 1960s and was established as a means to help African Americans reconnect with their African cultural and historical heritage by uniting in meditation and study of African traditions and Nguzo Saba, the “seven principles of African Heritage” which Karenga said “is a communitarian African philosophy.” For Karenga, a major figure in the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the creation of such holidays also underscored an essential premise that “you must have a cultural revolution before the violent revolution. The cultural revolution gives identity, purpose and direction.”
During the early years of Kwanzaa, Karenga said that it was meant to be an “oppositional alternative” to Christmas, However, as Kwanzaa gained mainstream adherents, Karenga altered his position so that practicing Christians would not be alienated, then stating in the 1997, Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and Culture, “Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday.”
Many African Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa do so in addition to observing Christmas.
Seven candles in a candelabra symbolize the seven principles of Kwanzaa.
Kwanzaa celebrates what its founder called the seven principles of Kwanzaa, or Nguzo Saba (originally Nguzu Saba—the seven principles of African Heritage), which Karenga said “is a communitarian African philosophy” consisting of what Karenga called “the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world.” These seven principles comprise “Kawaida, a Swahili word meaning “common.” Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the following principles, as follows:
• Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
• Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create 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 (Familyhood): 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.
In 2004, BIG Research conducted a marketing survey in the United States for the National Retail Foundation which found that 1.6 percent of those surveyed planned to celebrate Kwanzaa. If generalized to the US population as a whole, this would imply that around 4.7 million people planned to celebrate Kwanzaa in that year. In a 2006 speech, Maulana Karenga asserted that 28 million people celebrate Kwanzaa. He has always claimed it is celebrated all over the world. Lee D. Baker puts the number at 12 million. The African American Cultural Center claimed 30 million in 2009.
According to University of Minnesota Professor Keith Mayes, the author of Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition, the popularity within the US has “leveled off” as the Black Power Movement there has declined, and now between half and two million people celebrate Kwanzaa in the U.S., or between one and five percent of African Americans. Mayes adds that white institutions now celebrate it.
The holiday has also spread to Canada and is celebrated by Black Canadians in a similar fashion as in the United States. According to the Language Portal of Canada, “this fairly new tradition has [also] gained in popularity in France, Great Britain, Jamaica and Brazil.”
In Brazil, in recent years the term Kwanzaa has been applied by a few institutions as a synonym for the festivities of the Black Awareness Day, commemorated on November 20 in honor of Zumbi dos Palmares, having little to do with the celebration as it was originally conceived.
Stjepan Mestrovic, a sociology professor at the Texas A&M University, sees Kwanzaa as an example of postmodernism. According to Meštrović, modern society has discarded ancient traditions as racist, sexist or otherwise oppressive, but since living in a world where nothing is true is too terrifying to most people, “nice” and “synthetic” traditions like Kwanzaa have been created to cope with the nihilistic, individualistic modern society.
This article originally published in the December 26, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
