Joyous Kwanzaa: A Holiday Born of Afrocentrism and Black Nationalism
Celebrated annually from December 26 through January 1, Kwanzaa is something many Americans consider either a curiosity or a joke. To wonder whether anyone really observes Kwanzaa or to ridicule it as a āmade-up holiday,ā however, is to miss its fascinating origin story grounded in the evolution of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and in the life and career of its founder. For a holiday rightly understood as an embrace of African cultures and traditions, Kwanzaa ironically emerged from a peculiarly American history of Afrocentrism and black nationalism.
The creator of Kwanzaa was born Ronald Everett in Maryland in 1941. The fourteenth child of a minister and tenant farmer, Everett spent his childhood and adolescence in the fields before moving to California in the late 1950s. There, he earned an associateās degree at Los Angeles City College and enrolled at UCLA, where he completed his undergraduate training and went on to receive a masterās degree in political science, specializing in the theory and practice of nationalism.
Everett demonstrated a penchant for leadership and activism soon after arriving in California, becoming the first black student president at Los Angeles City College and getting involved with civil rights organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He also became interested in African cultures, histories, and languages, and his politics became increasingly radicalized as his education progressed over the course of the first half of the 1960s. By the middle of the decade, disenchantment with the progress made toward black equality in the United States led Everett to embrace ideas most clearly articulated by Malcolm X about black self-reliance and the need for black Americans to study and appreciate the distinctive virtues of their African ancestry.
The urban rebellion that broke out in the Watts district of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 proved a significant turning point in Everettās life. In its aftermath, he helped pull together local residents into a group known as the Black Congress to aid neighborhood rebuilding. That activity, in turn, led to the creation of an organization known as US, a reference to the notion of āUS black people,ā which called not only for black community organizing and unity but also for a broader turn toward black power and revolutionary black nationalism throughout the United States. Central to the politics and ideology of the US organization was a rejection of supposedly Eurocentric values and cultural expressions and an embrace of imagined pan-African ones instead.Ā
Accordingly, members of US founded independent schools for black children, dressed in kente and other traditional African attire, learned Swahili, and often changed their names to reflect identities consciously grounded in connections to Africa. Ronald Everett thus became Maulana Karenga, combining Swahili words meaning āmaster/teacherā and ākeeper of tradition.ā
By 1966, Karenga had elaborated his developing ideas about what he called āa communitarian African philosophyā into the Nguzo Saba, a set of seven principles each of which he expressed with a Swahili term: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith). Designed to promote racial pride and black liberation, the Nguzo Saba served as the foundation for the holiday of Kwanzaa.Ā
Pronounced by Karenga late in 1966, Kwanzaa was envisioned as an occasion for black people around the world to contemplate the year that was ending and plan for the year to come, to celebrate their African heritage and identities, and to focus on the Nzugo Saba as a platform for a black alternative to holiday festivals based in European traditions and customs.
The name Kwanzaa is derived from the Swahili phrase āmatunda ya kwanza,ā meaning āfirst fruits of the harvest,ā and the celebration of the holiday is grounded in a mĆ©lange of African harvest festivals. Spiritual but not religious in any particular way, Kwanzaa has no prescribed ritual components. But observances often include gatherings for meals that frequently involve symbolic foods, the sharing of libations, song and dance, readings, gift giving, the display of flags and posters, and the lighting of candles in a holder known as a kinara. Of the seven candles held by a kinara, three are red, three are green, and a central candle is black, a nod to the pan-African flag designed by Marcus Garveyās United Negro Improvement Association in 1920. Each candle, meanwhile, represents one of the seven principles of the Nguzo Saba, and Kwanzaa celebrants are encouraged to reflect on the meaning of a different principle as they light candles nightly during the holidayā¦Ā
