Kwanzaa is a young celebration rooted in an ancient culture and civilization.  Dr. Maulana Karenga, an Africentric scholar and activist, founded Kwanzaa in 1966.  It is a celebration that is observed from December 26 through January 1.  It is a non-religious celebration that was conceived as a way for African-Americans to remember and to celebrate our history and culture.  Moreover, the intent of the holiday is to emphasize seven moral principles, the Nguzo Saba, that arises from the cultural unity of African peoples.  Kwanzaa is a time of remembrance and of rededication to a struggle for freedom.

Quiet as it is kept, Africa is mother to one of the world’s great civilizations.  What we usually see of Africa in today’s media –disease, genocide, repression, starvation , war—hides the existence and the potency of African’s philosophy, religion, social structure, science, music, and art.  Ancient Egypt was both a Mediterranean and an African civilization.  It is the foundational civilization for a cultural unity that unifies African peoples across the globe.  Before the Atlantic Slave Trade, African peoples migrated to other continents.  During the more than 300 year history of the Atlantic Slave Trade, millions of Africans survived the Middle Passage and brought African ways of being to a wider world.

Poetry and polyrhythms dance haunting harmonies and melodies singing sacred life to every object at hand, exultant in a spiritual, religious, cosmology where a mediator god/human connects humanity to a distant Most High God.  And spiritual beings take possession of a believer and rides.  They speak truth and prophecy through the mouths of the human host.  An African cool lives its own existential authenticity with a wink and a smile, nonchalant in the face of a weary blues.

An African social philosophy understands the importance of the individual to the community and the importance of the community to the individual.  Because I am, we are.  Because we are, I am.  It disdains excess and considers immorality to be malodorous.  Enough is enough, and too much stinks.  Every elder woman is mother.  Every elder man is father.  Every contemporary is brother or sister.  Every child is one’s own child, to be respected and protected.  It is community without conformity.  It is improvisation and a democratic conversation with each individual voice taking a turn to solo.  It is jazz.

An African ethos tells tales of tricksters surviving life through courage and cunning.  African endurance just keeps on keeping on singing:  “walk, sing, pray together children don’t you ever get weary; there’s a great camp meeting going on in the Promised Land.”  And the Promised Land is the country we re-create here on earth.  African science makes something out of nothing, gives value to small things that are often overlooked as meaningless.  African wisdom sees the necessity for diversity and for creative patterns that confuse and disrupt evil, keeping it from running amok when there is no obstruction or no question because everyone and everything is the same.

Within this rich ground, the seven principles of Kwanzaa grow.  Each day represents one of the seven principles.

December 26:  Umoja (unity) Unity is solidarity.  It reminds us that family, community and nation are component parts of each other and of a larger whole.  It is important to see our individual lives within the context of the whole and know that our moral acting has reverberations that affect the whole.

December 27: Kujichagulia (self determination) As individuals and as a people, we have an obligation to learn ourselves and to create and re-create ourselves through our own thinking and acting.  We construct the character of who we are.  We deconstruct it.  We construct it again.  We name ourselves, determine our own goals and work toward their realization.  We define our own beauty.  We do not allow other people to circumscribe or to proscribe our possibilities.

December 28: Ujima (collective work and responsibility) Because we are necessary to the community and the community is necessary to our well-being, we ought to work together for its maintenance and for its flourishing.  We are all responsible for the cleanliness and safety of our streets.  We are together responsible for the quality of our community’s institutions –family, schools, faith congregations, business and government.

December 29: Ujamaa (cooperative economics) We are responsible for supporting local businesses and local businesses have a responsibility to the economic health of the community.  Small businesses create local jobs, thus it is important to begin to create business models that keep capital circulating locally for the benefit of the community.  This means an imagination that sees a future where most of the necessities of healthy living are produced locally.

December 30: Nia (purpose) Purpose is at once the goal and the resolve to accomplish the goal.  None of us exist through happenstance.  African philosophy teaches that inherent in any existant is a reason for its existence.  This is why one must be careful about the destruction of this or that.  When we destroy a thing, we destroy the benefit that thing brings to creation as a whole.  It is our moral responsibility to learn our own gifts and graces, to develop them and use them for the larger purpose of sustaining the community and the world.

December 31:  Kuumba (creativity) Kuumba is the imperative to use our creative imaginations to imagine a better world and then to use our scientific and artistic skills to re-create the world.  Regeneration, renewal is our work to do.  We take the elements of what the world gives us and reconfigure them to make a new world.  The next generation will deconstruct what we make, keep what is good and replace the bad with something better.  Kuumba is a vital element of all of the other principles.

January 1:  Imani (faith) Faith is a kind of knowing.  It is the assurance that our efforts matter, that what we think and do matters.  Our morals matter.  Faith is trust.  It is confidence in the knowledge of our own worth.  Faith is a belief that we carry the image of God, and that we ought to carry the image with dignity and with self-respect.  Faith tells us that we are the hands and feet of God, that we breathe God when we speak and act a radical love.

Kwanzaa and the seven principles it calls us to live require us to give the gift of ourselves to the world now and into an unseen and unknown new year.  Kwanzaa means that we give the first fruits of our efforts to the struggle for freedom, to the hope and promise of a brighter coming day.

Happy Kwanzaa.  Happy New Year. Peace.


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