Several years ago, in the Washington Times I believe, there was an article concerning kwanzaa written by a black American who was married to a black woman born and raised in Africa.
One day their children came home with special school projects for kwanzaa. Having never heard of it he asked his children who told him it was a traditional African celebration.
He asked his African born wife who hadn’t a clue.
When the teacher couldn’t give him a real explanation for this African celebration he started contacting African embassies in DC.
The first one he contacted said they had never heard of it, “try Ghana it might be one of theirs.”
He called, visited or emailed every African embassy in DC and drew a complete blank.
The best answer he got was that it was probably something dreamed up by one of the black supremacist groups here in the US. It wasn’t African.
It is pure American invention, not a bit of Africa in it.
It came from the devil via a pseudo “Dr.”:
Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga (born Ronald McKinley Everett;[2][3][4] July 14, 1941) is an African-American professor of Africana studies, activist and author, best known as the creator of the pan-African and African-American holiday of Kwanzaa.
Ron Everett was born in Parsonsburg, Maryland, the fourteenth child and seventh son in the family. His father was a tenant farmer and Baptist minister who employed the family to work fields under an effective sharecropping arrangement.
The Watts riots broke out as Karenga was a year into his doctoral studies. Karenga and the Circle of Seven established a ultra-radical, paramilitary, black nationalist cult organization in the aftermath called US (meaning “Us black people or United Slave”).[8]..
US developed a youth component with para-military aspects called the Simba Wachanga
...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.”[5]
US engaged in violent competition with the Black Panther Party in their claim to be a revolutionary vanguard. This heightened level of conflict eventually led to a shoot-out at UCLA in 1969 in which two Panthers were killed. Following the UCLA shootout, Panthers and US members carried out a series of retaliatory shootings that resulted in at least two more deaths among the Panthers.
In 1971, Karenga was sentenced to one to ten years in prison on counts of felonious assault and false imprisonment.[15] One of the victims gave testimony of how Karenga and other men tortured her and another woman. The woman described having been stripped and beaten with an electrical cord. Karenga’s estranged wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified that she sat on the other woman’s stomach while another man forced water into her mouth through a hose. - wikipedia.org/
Another way of distinguishing might be to think of Karenga’s gang as the Crips and the Panthers as the bloods. Despite all their rhetoric about white people, they reserved their most vicious violence for each other. In 1969, the two groups squared off over the question of who would control the new Afro-American Studies Center at UCLA. According to a Los Angeles Times article, Karenga and his adherents backed one candidate, the Panthers another. Both groups took to carrying guns on campus, a situation that, remarkably, did not seem to bother the university administration. The Black Student Union, however, set up a coalition to try and bring peace between the Panthers and the group headed by the man whom the Times labeled “Ron Ndabezitha Everett-Karenga.”
On Jan. 17, 1969, about 150 students gathered in a lunchroom to discuss the situation. Two Panthers—admitted to UCLA like many of the black students as part of a federal program that put high-school dropouts into the school—apparently spent a good part of the meeting in verbal attacks against Karenga. This did not sit well with Karenga’s followers, many of whom had adopted the look of their leader, pseudo-African clothing and a shaved head.
In modern gang parlance, you might say Karenga was “dissed” by John Jerome Huggins, 23, and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, 26. After the meeting, the two Panthers were met in the hallway by two brothers who were members of US, George P. and Larry Joseph Stiner. The Stiners pulled pistols and shot the two Panthers dead. One of the Stiners took a bullet in the shoulder, apparently from a Panther’s gun.
“The students here have handled themselves in an absolutely impeccable manner,” UCLA chancellor Charles E. Young told the L.A. Times. “They have been concerned. They haven’t argued who the director should be; they have been saying what kind of person he should be.” Young made those remarks after the shooting....
Despite all his rhetoric about white racism, I could find no record that he or his followers ever raised a hand in anger against a white person. In fact, Karenga had an excellent relationship with Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty in the ‘60s and also met with then-Governor Ronald Reagan and other white politicians. But he and his gang were hell on blacks. And Karenga certainly seems to have had a low opinion of his fellow African-Americans. “People think it’s African, but it’s not,” he said about his holiday in an interview quoted in the Washington Post. “I came up with Kwanzaa because black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods would be partying.” “Bloods” is a ‘60s California slang term for black people. - http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=20535