[AnAmericanMother]

BTW, I roomed in college with a Kikuyu girl. She thought all this "pan-African" stuff was unbelievably silly, mostly because Africa is still so tribal (she thought of herself as Kikuyu, not "Kenyan") and the Kwanzaa stuff is such a misch-masch of traditions from all over. (Why a bunch of folks descended primarily from West Africans picked Swahili to learn instead of, say, Yoruba, is one of the great mysteries . . . )

[tcuoohjohn]

Absolutely...Kwanzaa is not an African festival. It is an African American festival. MUch like jazz is not african music but African-American music in origin.

In my family we have cornbeef and cabbage on New Year's day as a celebration of our Irish heritage. When I told that to a Irishman in Dublin he laughed his butt off. He said there were damn few jewish delis in famine Ireland.

Then it dawned on me...The corned beef and cabbage is merely an evocation of the American perception of the Irish experience. The same is true for Kwanzaa it is an evocation the African experience as seen through the eyes of African Americans. It may bear no resemblance to the current or historical experience of Africans but that never was the point. I suspect that Christmas celebrations would look pretty damn odd to an early Christian as well.

[tcuoohjohn]

You do raise an additional point that is interesting. I suspect that Africa's problems have been born out of that issue. Regionalism and Tribalism, not the colonial experience, is the wellspring of African difficulty. ( The Hutu- Tutsi split is the most graphic recent example) It is the engine of conflict they has retarded African development. I suspect that a Democratic Capitalist Pan-African Movement would be much more effective than the narrow tribal/regional model. A United States of Africa using an African version of federalism as a model.

As to the Yoruba versus Swahili issue.. Who knows.. I suspect that is may come from the availability of Swahili teachers from language schools as opposed to the paucity Yoruba instructors. I noticed that in India that Indian English sounds suspiciously like Irish English and that the teachers of street english in India were often Irishman either priests, brothers, nuns, or soldiers.