It’s The Season Of Kwanzaa

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 Kwanzaa starts tomorrow, December 26th and goes on until January 1st, culminating in a communal feast called Karamu. Kwanzaa is an annual celebration of African-American culture that was invented and promoted by Maulana Karenga, a Black American leader.

Karenga was active in the Black Power movement of the 1960s. He was a part of the Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1965, Karenga and Hakim Jamal co-founded the black nationalist group US Organization, which became involved in violent clashes with the Black Panther Party by 1969. In 1971, he was convicted of felony assault, torture, and false imprisonment of women. Karenga denied involvement and claimed the prosecution was political in nature. Karenga was imprisoned in California Men's Colony until he received parole in 1975.

Karenga created Kwanzaa in 1966 to be a non-Christian, specifically African-American, holiday, that would be an alternative for black people to Christmas. Karenga hoped that Kwanzaa would give black people an opportunity to celebrate their culture and history, instead of copying the culture of those who had dominated and oppressed black people.

Kwanzaa is based on African harvest festival traditions from various parts of West and Southeast Africa and was first celebrated in 1966. These days, most of those who celebrate Kwanzaa do so in addition to Christmas rather than as an alternative to Christmas.

The name Kwanzaa derives from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, meaning "first fruits".

Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the following principles, as follows:

  • Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
  • Kujichagulia (Self-determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create and speak for ourselves.
  • 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.
  • Ujamaa (Cooperative economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
  • Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
  • Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

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