Kwanzaa

Celebrating and Strengthening African Heritage
with Pan-AfricanValues

Kwanzaa. The word, derived from the Swahili phrase for “first fruits,” rolls mellifluously off the tongue.

If it’s not familiar to you, don’t feel bad; the word and the secular holiday it represents are relatively new to the English language. Black Americans have been celebrating Kwanzaa since it was created in 1966, and the holiday enjoys a growing popularity both inside and outside the ethnic subculture. The U.S. Postal Service prints Kwanzaa stamps, and the White House sends out an official Kwanzaa message, just as it does for Christmas and Hanukkah.

Last year, Kwanzaa came to the Blanchard House, Punta Gorda’s museum of local black history, for the first time. About 50 children and some of their parents attended the event.

“We danced, sang songs and ate good food,” said Josephine Qualls, the museum’s director of children’s programs. “Fried chicken, baked fish, collard and mustard greens, candied yams and fresh fruit. We gave gifts, too, but only educational gifts are given at Kwanzaa. That’s to show the children it’s not how much you spend, it’s the thought behind it.”

Kwanzaa was designed to be the antithesis of our modern consumer-oriented Christmas. It’s an anticapitalist, anti-materialistic, anti-mystical holiday that paradoxically begins on December 26, the day after- Christmas sales start, and runs through January 1. That’s the harvest season in much of equatorial Africa, and traditional harvest festivals were what inspired Dr. Maulana Karenga (a.k.a. Ron Everett) to create Kwanzaa. Karenga, a professor at California State University-Long Beach, was a controversial figure during the 1960’s “Black Power” movement. The Black Panthers judged him too radical for their tastes, and in the 1970’s, he was jailed for four years in a case of felony battery and kidnapping.

Now reformed and rehabilitated, Karenga maintains a Kwanzaa Web site, (www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org) and has the satisfaction of seeing his holiday celebrated not just among black Americans, but by millions worldwide. Karenga didn’t want to “blackwash” a traditional European holiday like Christmas. Rather, he wanted to enrich and strengthen black American culture with what he considered to be pan-African values.

“The psychological significance that Kwanzaa has to black people as a whole is very important,” Karenga wrote. “Kwanzaa is a black image, and what black people need more than anything else at this time in the history of their development are successful black images.”

Each day of the weeklong celebration extols a different virtue. The Seven Principles, or Nguzo Saba, are each expressed by a lighted candle and a Swahili word:

• Umoja, or unity – The first and most important principle, it stresses unity of family, community, race, society and world. Karenga says, “it teaches us to practice principled togetherness in all we do, to see the sacred in our oneness and to embrace relatedness, reciprocity and responsibility as core concepts…for the world.”
• Kujichagulia, or self-determination – Taken for granted by most white Americans, this means to be able to speak for yourself, define yourself and name yourself, rather than having these things done for you or to you. It also requires “mutual recognition of the rights of others…without domination, deprivation or degradation,” Karenga states.
• Ujima, or collective work and responsibility – This principle cultivates an appreciation of cooperation and shared responsibility. As Karenga says, “We must, and can, build the good world we all want and deserve to live in.”
• Ujamaa, or cooperative economics – “Shared work and shared wealth,” as Karenga puts it. Originally, this could be seen as a call to blacks to help support black-owned and operated businesses. But there’s more to it than just that. Like Native Americans, Karenga believes “the earth belongs equally to all of us, not as a possession but as a shared resource and responsibility” held in trust for future generations.
• Nia, or purpose – According to Karenga, ancestral African teachings state that humans are “chosen to bring good into the world.” Just who chose us? Karenga, an avowed atheist, doesn’t say, but he describes Nia as a “sacred assignment given by heaven and compelled by history.”
• Kuumba, or creativity – More than personal indulgence, Karenga calls on followers to heal, repair and renew the earth. To “speak truth, do justice, care for the vulnerable, satisfy the needs of the have-nots, welcome the stranger, bekind and considerate” and halt environmental destruction are the edicts of Kuumba.
• Imani, or Faith – Karenga isn’t necessarily talking about religion, but about faith in working for the good and eventual establishment of equality and justice in society. African society was traditionally pagan and animistic; tribes worshipped their ancestors, local totems and gods. Later, parts of Africa were converted to Islam before the first Christian missionaries arrived in the 15th Century.

“We’ve lost our principal faiths,” Qualls said, speaking of American blacks in general. “We now practice several faiths. We must believe in something — believe in what you do, your parents, your teachers and yourself. These are very important factors in ‘natural faith.’”

Kwanzaa seems to be spreading from black urban centers to the rest of the country, though it’s difficult to find many people in Charlotte County who keep the holiday. Twenty years ago, when she was a mother of two young children in Tampa, Kwanzaa was very important to Dr. Martha Bireda, former president of the board of Blanchard House. Her family celebrated both Christmas and Kwanzaa. While her Christmas gifts were more extravagant, Bireda’s Kwanzaa gifts todaughter Saba or son Jaha were either educational, such as books, or cultural, such as items of African clothing.

Each night, the family would light another of the candles expressing the Nguzo Saba. “I didn’t decorate much other than the candles and the African colors,” Bireda said. The colors of Kwanzaa are red, green and black: red for the blood that was shed in slavery, green for hope and black for the race.

“We didn’t do much with the traditional foods, either,” Bireda added. “We usually got invited to someone’s house for dinner.”

Although she no longer keeps the holiday, Bireda believes that celebrating Kwanzaa with her children gave them a sense of identity and self-worth that has helped them become successful adults. Saba graduated from Harvard and practices law in Philadelphia; Jaha graduated from Dartmouth and now owns a publishing house in Guam. “I brought my children up with traditional African-American values,” Bireda said. “Being identified with and connected to your culture makes you a whole person. I hope my kids will celebrate Kwanzaa with their children.”

Although she doesn’t have any offspring, Dorothy Fulton has kept Kwanzaa since she started celebrating it in New York City 10 years ago. “It’s a time of recommitment to family and friends,” she said. “We would get together for dinner and talk about thepast, reflect on our grandparents and others who have gone on and exchange gifts.”

Fulton, who sits on the museum’s board, likes to wear the traditional African uwole for Kwanzaa, a loose flowing robe decorated with colorful patterns. “It shows you don’t have to become Americanized,” she said, “but you can wear whatever makes you feel comfortable.” She festoons her home with garlands and drapes her couches with throw cloths in the traditional colors.

Libations, a beverage offering to the ancestors or deities, aren’t common in most religious services, but they play a part in Kwanzaa. Sometimes a chalice is passed, and each celebrant takes a sip and pours a little on the ground. Fulton found an alternative route. At her Kwanzaa, each participant is invited to remember an ancestor by name, then water a potted plant in his or her memory.

Bireda and Fulton both describe themselves as Christians who keep Christmas as well as Kwanzaa. Celebrating the holiday seems to express a longing not merely for black unity and solidarity in America, but for a lost African heritage that was for centuries denied, degraded and disparaged here and in much of the world.

As Jared Diamond has postulated in his bestselling book, Guns, Germs and Steel, the European dominance of the colonial and post-colonial worlds has nothing to do with racial superiority or inferiority and everything to do with quirks of politics, geography and biology.

“I’ve never been to the Motherland, but I have a closeness to Africa,” Qualls said. “I pray I get a chance to go back. I wish I could have a part of Africa to sit back and watch.”

This year, Kwanzaa will again be celebrated at the Blanchard House. Qualls hopes for a bigger turnout and that more parents will accompany their offspring this time to learn about their African heritage. For more information on the Blanchard House Museum’s Kwanzaa celebration, call (941) 575-7518 or contact the director, Scot Shively, at scotshively@comcast.net.