Posted on 12/27/2004 6:45:37 AM PST by ConservativeDude
Kwanzaa, a time to foster pride in African culture Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services
Associated Press Gary Harvey stands behind a kinara, a candleholder similar to a menorah, as he gives a Kwanzaa presentation Sunday at the Hope Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church in Utica, N.Y. The seven-day festival, which was established 38 years ago by Maulana Karenga, celebrates family, community and culture.
HACKENSACK, N.J. -- For Marlene Ware, a teacher at Teaneck High School, Kwanzaa is an opportunity to demystify Africa.
"A lot of African-Americans to this day really don't acknowledge the role that Africa has in the world," Ware said.
As organizer of the high school's annual Kwanzaa celebration, which was held earlier this month, Ware uses the holiday to demonstrate the importance of Africa to people of all races.
She understands that Kwanzaa, which began Sunday, can be of particular value to young African-Americans. Ware said many young people have distorted impressions of Africa, and Kwanzaa can correct that.
"We're really hoping it does raise self-esteem, particularly of African-Americans about their culture. They really don't know about Africa," she said.
In addition to organizing the high school's Kwanzaa festival, Ware teaches African dance and organizes trips to the continent every few years. At the Kwanzaa celebration on Dec. 12, Ware had classes teaching African drumming and jewelry-making as well as a ceremony explaining the seven principles of Kwanzaa.
"It's a time when the community comes together and celebrates African culture, and that's why we did it."
Families and educators look to Kwanzaa as a way to educate young people, particularly young African-Americans, about Africa as well as the struggles blacks have faced in the United States.
"It invites family time and family unity and it gives them another sense of who they are," said Keli Drew Lockhart-Ba of Trenton, a psychologist who celebrates the holiday with her family and runs a business, Creative Memories, that constructs family scrapbooks for special occasions like Kwanzaa.
"It connects people to their heritage," said Verushka Spirito, associate director for performances at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, which held its annual children's festival earlier this month and drew about 5,000 youths from around the state. The event included African dance classes, where young people attempted to soar and twirl down the dance floor, as well as face-painting, music concerts and storytelling.
Kwanzaa was first observed in 1966. It was created by Maulana Karenga, now the chairman of the black studies department at California State University at Long Beach, as a way for African-Americans to celebrate their roots in Africa. It is now observed by millions of people around the world.
The holiday's name comes from the Swahili matunda ya kwanza, which means "first fruits." And Kwanzaa uses as its inspiration for its ceremonies the early harvest celebrations in Africa.
Kwanzaa celebrates the Nguzo Saba, or the seven principles. They are umoja, or unity; kujichagulia, or self-determination; ujima, or collective work and responsibility; ujamaa, or cooperative economics; nia, or purpose; kuumba, or creativity; and imani, or faith. During each night of the holiday, celebrants light a candle on the kinara, a candleholder similar to a menorah, to recognize each of the principles. Each day a different principle is celebrated.
For Lockhart-Ba, the non-religious nature of the holiday makes it a great way to share a special moment with her family since her husband is Muslim and she is Christian.
"It's not a religious holiday, it gives our family an opportunity to understand our heritage and we go over all the principles and for each principle we have the kids read them," Lockhart-Ba said.
Ware said it's important to tear down stereotypes about Africa.
Bridgette Johnson, a senior at Teaneck High School, said that many of her peers only think of famine and AIDS when they imagine the subcontinent.
"I think when people think of Africa, they think of HIV and the commercials on TV with the hungry kids," said Johnson. "If people asked me if there is one place I wanted to go, I would say Africa."
Johnson and Ware, along with 18 other fine- and performing-arts students and another teacher, are traveling to Ghana this spring to experience Africa firsthand. The group, called THREAD -- Teaneck High Represents Education Art and Diversity -- has held bake sales and talent shows to raise money for its trip, which isn't officially being sponsored by the board of education.
"Ghana is a big part of the middle passage," Ware said. The middle passage is the journey African slaves took to reach the United States from Africa. Ghana is one of the countries where slaves were transported to the New World. "It's really going to be an excellent experience." The students will exchange lessons with their peers from Ghana during the trip.
Johnson said many friends were shocked she wanted to travel to Ghana.
"When I told a lot of people I was going to Africa they told me, `Don't talk to me,' when I get back, `You'll have AIDS,'" Johnson said.
"It's a chance to get out of America and in school everyone always talk about the facts about Africa and nobody really knows," said Sade Henry, also a senior at Teaneck High School. "I think we should learn more about Africa."
Johnson said that if more people celebrated Kwanzaa, there would be a greater understanding of the importance of the continent.
"Unless you celebrate the holiday, you don't know the gist of it," Henry said.
More on Karenga. Great article.
To confirm the creation and history of the holiday, I Googled Kwanzaa and its creator, Maulana Karenga. On my first search, I came up with this column by Paul Mulshine, a columnist with the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger. Read it all. It's a doozey. According to Mulshine, Karenga was a black separatist, a member of a group more radical than the Black Panthers, who was convicted of brutally torturing two female members of his organization just a few years after he created Kwanzaa.
He was sentenced on Sept. 17, 1971, to serve one to ten years in prison. A brief account of the sentencing ran in several newspapers the following day. That was apparently the last newspaper article to mention Karenga's unfortunate habit of doing unspeakable things to black people. After that, the only coverage came from the hundreds of news accounts that depict him as the wonderful man who invented Kwanzaa.
So do I...
Or the Boer culture?
Blacks have Kwanzaa
What about Asians? Asians also contributed to America.
Where is their holiday???
"African culture" doesn't exist as an identifiable entity.
The traditional cultures of Africa are infinitely more diverse than those of Europe, which all have the Christian faith and (almost all) Indo-European language in common.
African cultures have literally nothing in common except skin color.
(When talking of "Africa," they really mean sub-Saharan Africa, although they almost never say so.)
Yeah... it's widely celebrated in our penal institutions.
It's funny until our government-run schools start trying to displace Christmas and substitute it with Kwanzaa.
I agree but wish to add....Everytime I see them celebrate this fake holiday and ask for compensation FOR SOMETHING THEY NEVER ENDURED, I want to put them on a boat and see how they really like Africa!!
Don't forget the white-guy subsidiary, "Whole Cloth Genealogy Inc."
But English is being used more and more. I work with a guy that came from Eritrea. Next to Sudan. He has the darkest skin color imaginable and is a Christian. Black Americans don't have much of a connection to Africa anymore. Similarly, I don't have a connection to Germany, Scotland and Russia because it's not the culture that made an adult out of me.
It's a crock, and apart from some African-sounding words, has nothing to do with Africa.
This is patent male bovine excrement.
A large portion of the people that are most susceptible to this snake oil pitch are muslim and this goes against that twisted and perverted dogma.
The rest are moderately educated people that see through the silliness of an "invented" culture.
Most likely the figure is in the thousands, although I will admit that quite a few pay it lip service for no other reason than a rejection of values that they perceive are other than black, i.e, "white" Christmas.
And I submit that if they knew the background of the felonious pervert that started all this kwanzaa crap, they'd most likely reject it.
Some people are really, really stupid, though and will follow the other lemmings right off the cliff without a second thought.
'Kwanza' = African 'Festivus'
The TRUTH about Kwanzaa
By Tony Snow
BLACKS IN AMERICA have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.
Ron Karenga (aka Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, branding it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.
According to the official Kwanzaa Web site -- as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site -- the celebration was designed to foster "conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans" and provide a "reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans' ancestors."
Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: "We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination."
Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term "matunda yakwanza," or "first fruit," and the festival's trappings have Swahili names -- such as "ujima" for "collective work and responsibility" or "muhindi," which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.
Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.
To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing "G-d Save the Queen" in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.
Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don't necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren't promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term "ujima," which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.
Even the rituals using corn don't fit. Corn isn't indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.
The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.
Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you'll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.
Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.
Detroit native Keith Richburg writes in his extraordinary book, "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa," that "this strange place defies even the staunchest of optimists; it drains you of hope ..."
Richburg, who served for three years as the African bureau chief for The Washington Post, offers a challenge for the likes of Karenga: "Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I'll throw it back in your face, and then I'll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh."
His book concludes: "I have been here, and I have seen -- and frankly, I want no part of it. .... By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today -- my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires -- derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact."
Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday -- Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices -- "cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility" -- that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.
Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.
This year, President Clinton signed his fourth Kwanzaa proclamation. He crooned: "The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity."
But our strength, as Richburg points out, comes from real principles: tolerance, brotherhood, hard work, personal responsibility, equality before the law. If Americans really cared about racial healing, they would focus on those ideas -- and not on a made-up rite that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.
I'm, not so sure all blacks consider this made up holiday as their prideful roots. In fact, the blacks I know do not believe in the murder and violence that man who created this garbage did. Kwanzaa is a nothing but an FBI made up holiday to get the racist and violent blacks within their control.
Kwanzaa is FBI control of blacks.
(cough) BULLSH*T (cough)
Mona Charen
The Spirit of Kwanzaa
The International Black Buyers and Manufacturers Expo and Conference, an association representing more than 1,000 black-owned businesses, has sent a blistering letter to large American firms like Hallmark Cards and Giant Food, telling them to keep their hands off Kwanzaa-related products. The sale of Kwanzaa products by non-black businesses, the organization contends, is "arrogantly exploitative of the culture of African people." According to The Washington Post, Sala Damali, one of the founders of the IBBMEC, said, "Many companies look at it as a normal exercise of commerce. We find it insulting and disrespectful to the actual spirit of Kwanzaa."
Well. First, let us consider what the response would be if an association of white business owners (that very idea is anathema) were to issue a statement saying that blacks should not sell items related to, say, St. Lucia's Day, a Scandinavian festival. It would be called racist within a nanosecond.
The notion that only blacks should buy and sell Kwanzaa products is equally offensive.
As to the "spirit of Kwanzaa," that is a more sensitive matter. Americans have clasped Kwanzaa to their bosom. Major TV stations elevate it to the same status as other winter holidays, like Christmas and Hanukkah, by broadcasting "Happy Kwanzaa" greetings between Christmas and the New Year. Products for Kwanzaa, including candelabras and greeting cards, fill the stores. A quick Lexis-Nexis search of Kwanzaa stories in major newspapers turns up hundreds of feel-good features about the "spirit of sharing" (Los Angeles Times), the "feast for body and soul" (Baltimore Sun), "food, fellowship and pride" (Seattle Times) and "community unity" (The Orlando Sentinel).
Most Americans, eager to respect the traditions of every group, assume that Kwanzaa is what it sounds like: a traditional African celebration handed down over the generations.
But Kwanzaa actually began in 1966, the brainchild of Ronald Everett. Everett -- who rejected his "slave name" and adopted the title "Maulana," Swahili for "master teacher," and the name (Ron) Karenga -- was a radical black nationalist who founded a gang called US (United Slaves) and did battle, figuratively and literally, with the Black Panthers. Karenga wanted to design an alternative to Christmas for American blacks. So, with a pinch here and a word there -- Kwanzaa is adapted from a Swahili phrase meaning "first fruit" -- and heavy borrowing from non-African symbols like the candelabrum, he stitched together his holiday.
It is reasonable to ask why American blacks, who have been Christian longer than the Mormons or the Christian Scientists, should need an alternative to Christmas. But Kwanzaa is catching on. The holiday lasts seven nights and is dedicated to seven principles. These principles are little more than the self-important gaseousness of 1960s radicalism: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Amiri Baraka, nee LeRoi Jones -- he changed his name at Karenga's urging -- has now become a Marxist and blesses Kwanzaa by describing it as "really socialism -- collective work, cooperative economics."
Ron Karenga is now a respected member of the American establishment. He is a professor at California State University at Long Beach and the chairman of the Black Studies Department. He would like people to forget his violent, even vicious past. When the United Slaves and Black Panthers tangled, people were killed. Karenga hates to see it called murder. It was, he insists, just a "shoot-out." He would also like people to forget the time he spent in prison for ordering the torture of a young woman.
Do the millions of black Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa think of it as the ritualization of socialism? Doubtful. Do they object to the mainstreaming of Kwanzaa symbols and products? Probably not. Do they know anything about Karenga and his past? It doesn't seem so. When Karenga spoke at the Million Man March, he went virtually unnoticed.
But the holiday's origins in a terrible time and with a terrible person are certainly relevant to its legitimacy. Unlike the birthday of Martin Luther King, Kwanzaa celebrates separatism and black nationalism. Perhaps the IBBMEC is right. Perhaps the practice of so many big American corporations to domesticate the holiday with greeting cards and special products is "disrespectful to the actual spirit of Kwanzaa." It is not a spirit that bears close examination.
"Whites have Christmas
Blacks have Kwanzaa
"
Blacks have Christmas. FBI controlled black racists have kwanzaa. If you want to put your statement in context of Kwanzaa, it would be best to say:
Black racists have Kwanzaa, what does the KKK have?
The True Spirit of Kwanzaa
by William Norman Grigg
Among Bill Clinton’s numerous despicable distinctions is the fact that he is the first occupant of the Oval Office to extend official recognition to the ersatz holiday called "Kwanzaa," a seven-day annual "African" festival that runs from December 26th to New Year’s Day. Mr. Clinton has described Kwanzaa as "a vibrant celebration of African culture" that "transcends international boundaries … link[ing] diverse individuals in a unique celebration of a dynamic heritage." In fact, Kwanzaa is a product of violent black separatism, and it was designed to foment insularity and a sense of racial grievance.
The founder of Kwanzaa is a petty criminal named Ronald Everett, alias Ron Karenga. In the mid-1960s, Everett created a Los Angeles-based black militant group called United Slaves (US) for the purpose of igniting a "cultural revolution" among American blacks. Toward that end he created Kwanzaa (named after a Swahili term for "first fruits") as a way of evangelizing on behalf of his revolution. In his book Kwanzaa: Origins, Concepts, Practice, "Karenga" claims that the spurious holiday offers blacks "an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society."
However, "Karenga’s" so-called Nguzo Saba (seven principles) for his "new black value system" are little more than Marxism transposed into an afrocentric key: Umoja (unity); Kujichagulia (self-determination), which, according to "Karenga," refers to afrocentricity; Ujima (collective work and responsibility); Ujamaa (cooperative economics), which "Karenga" describes as "essentially a commitment to the practice of shared social wealth"; Nia (purpose), which refers to "collective vocation" for black people; Kuumba (creativity); and Imani (faith).
To provide a tangible symbol of his seven principles, "Karenga" appropriated the menorah from Judaism, adorning it in Kwanzaa’s seasonal colors (red, black, and green) and re-christening it the "kinara." No Kwanzaa celebration is complete without the recitation of the Kwanzaa pledge: "We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one God of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination."
This is the stuff of parody; it is a photographic negative of the rites conducted by bedsheet-bedecked white supremacists who cavort around burning crosses, or neo-Nazis who offer oblations to their pagan deity Odin. Yet "Karenga" and his black nationalist holiday have been eagerly embraced by the apostles of multiculturalism and tolerance. In his presidential messages commemorating Kwanzaa, Bill Clinton has stated that "Karenga’s" seven principles "ring true not only for African Americans, but also for all Americans … bring[ing] new purpose to our daily lives." In recent years the mainstreaming of Kwanzaa has proceeded at an astonishing pace. The U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in 1997, and the Smithsonian Institution sponsors an annual celebration.
Christian activist Carlotta Morrow, whose sister was lured into "Karenga’s" United Slaves organization in the 1970s, is much less enchanted with the observance, describing its message as "anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and black separatist" in nature. To the extent that the holiday bears the impress of its creator, it should also be seen as a celebration of depravity and violence.
On several occasions, factional quarrels between "Karenga’s" US organization and the Black Panthers erupted into open gunplay, which resulted in the death of several people.
In 1970, "Karenga" and two of his followers were arrested and charged with conspiracy and assault in the torture of Deborah Jones and Gail Davis, two of his female followers. Believing that the women had tried to poison him, "Karenga" forced the women to disrobe at gunpoint and had them beaten. "Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know," he informed his victims, whereupon he forced a hot soldering iron into the mouth of one while the other had a toe squeezed in a vice. Both women were also forced to consume detergent and a caustic liquid as part of their "discipline."
According to the July 27, 1971 Los Angeles Times, a psychological profile of "Karenga" described him "as a danger to society who is in need of prolonged custodial treatment in prison." The profile noted that "Karenga," while legally sane, was "confused and not in contact with reality." Neither his criminal record nor his insuperable difficulties with reality has impeded "Karenga’s" career prospects, however: He is presently professor and chair of the department of Black Studies at California State University-Long Beach.
While some might consider Ron "Karenga’s" implausible triumph to be an illustration of P.T. Barnum’s axiom regarding human gullibility, there is something much worse than foolishness at work. Kwanzaa offers a potent illustration of Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci’s strategy for overthrowing Western society by conducting a "long march through the institutions" of culture, including educational and religious institutions. It is this urge to destroy and defile our Western patrimony that represents the true spirit of Kwanzaa.
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