The seven principles of Kwanzaa are key to our survival
27th December 2021 · 0 Comments
Raise your hand if you’re celebrating Kwanzaa this year; if you’re going all out to light Kinara candles, host a communal feast called a Karamu, exchange homemade gifts, and recommit to the seven principles of Kwanzaa from December 26, 2021, through January 1, 2022.
Kwanzaa means “harvest” or “first fruits,” and Nguzo Saba means “seven principles” in Swahili. The annual seven-day holiday was created in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, department chair of Africana Studies at California State University, to celebrate pan-African culture and African-American life, including heritage, community, family, justice, foods and nature.
The concept and practice of Kwanzaa is rooted in both ancient African harvest celebrations and the Black Freedom Movement and calls for and urges an active and ongoing commitment to African and human good and the well-being of the world, Karenga explains in his 2020 Kwanzaa address.
Those of us who don’t partake in Kwanzaa’s annual ritual should, at the very least, consider embracing the seven principles of Kwanzaa, which could be our saving grace in the hostile environment we are experiencing.
Our communities, writ large, are under siege. White supremacists within and outside of government, in corporate boardrooms and institutions of power, seek to disenfranchise our votes, forward progress, and quality of life.
They accuse us of perpetrating cancel culture, implementing replacement strategies, and taking something (Power? Jobs? Money?) away from white people.
The attack on Black people in this nation is nothing new. In 1966 when Dr. Karenga founded Kwanzaa, the nation’s first Pan-African celebration, the U.S. Senate filibustered a Civil Rights Bill. The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing across America, and the Black Panther Party was formed. The previous year the Voting Rights Act was passed. One week later, the Watts Riots occurred.
Racial tensions were widespread when Karenga put forth the Kwanzaa celebration, a fitting holiday for self-validation during degrading and cruel treatment of Blacks back then by police and others.
Today, the unspoken race war against people of color continues. White legislators are passing restrictive voting laws, Critical Race Theory (exploring racism in the judiciary), and using the 1619 Project to teach American history are being cited as harmful to America’s legacy.
Some white parents are demanding a ban on Afro-centric children’s books because these books might make white children feel bad about being white.
These attacks aren’t just coming from statehouses and Congress. Microaggressions by so-called “Karens” and “Karls” are mindboggling, unnecessary traffic stops, over-incarceration, the lack of investment and access to capital in urban communities, and attempts to keep Confederate monuments in the public square are cannon fodder in the war to return us to second-class citizenship.
“And the crisis and challenges are, not only the daily and destructive assaults on the Earth and its ecosystems, its animals and their habitats, and the resultant disease and devastation, but also the domination, deprivation, and degradation of humans themselves by systems of interrelated oppression,” Karenga writes, making a case for observing the seven principles of Kwanzaa.
“This results in unfreedom, unhealthiness and illness, homelessness, loss and lack of income, police violence, food insecurity, and lack of access to pure water, income and quality education and other necessities of life. And this must be resisted and overcome.”
Each of us who understand what’s happening to our collective communities can and must do something. The seven principles of Kwanzaa, if applied year-round, can change the negative paradigm in which we find ourselves. It appears that Black people must band together and help each other survive the tyranny of those who endeavor to oppress us….still.
Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the principles, as follows:
1. Umoja (Unity): To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race;
2. Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define and name ourselves and create and speak for ourselves;
3. 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;
4. Ujamaa (Cooperative economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and profit from them together;
5. Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community to restore our people to their traditional greatness;
6. Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it; and
7. 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.
Let’s do this!
This article originally published in the December 27, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
