Discover the Networks Kwanzaa is a week-long festival celebrated mainly in the U.S. from December 26 through January 1 each year. It was established in 1966 by the socialist and black nationalist Maulana Karenga, who promoted the holiday as a black alternative to Christmas. Karenga’s idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans. According to the official Kwanzaa website, the celebration was originally designed to foster “conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans,” and to provide a “reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans’ ancestors.” Karenga postulated seven major principles to be emphasized during Kwanzaa, identifying each by its Swahili name:

  • Umoja (Unity): “to strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race”
  • Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): “to define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves” (i.e., race-consciousness and identity politics)
  • Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): “to build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems, and to solve them together” (i.e., socialism and groupthink)
  • Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): “to build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together” (code for “buy black”); Karenga describes this principle as “essentially a commitment to the practice of shared social wealth”—a euphemism for communism.
  • Nia (Purpose): “to make our collective vocation the building and development of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness” (i.e., identity politics)
  • 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”
  • Imani (Faith): “to believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle” (Kwanzaa, like Marxism, is based upon a faith in man, not in God. Contrary to traditional monotheism, it worships no god at all. Rather, Kwanzaa deifies people and their ancestors. It substitutes faith in the self and in the collective, for faith in a divine creator. Karenga himself once described Kwanzaa as “an oppositional alternative to the spookism, mysticism and non-earth based practices which plague us as a people.” On another occasion, he described Christianity as a “belief in spooks who threaten us if we don’t worship them and demand we turn over our destiny and daily lives” to them. Such a belief system, Karenga asserted, “must be categorized as spookism and condemned.” Karenga has explained that his creation of Kwanzaa was motivated in part by hostility toward both Christianity and Judaism. In his 1980 book Kawaida Theory, for instance, he claimed that Western religion “denies and diminishes human worth, capacity, potential and achievement.” “In Christian and Jewish mythology,” Karenga added, “humans are born in sin, cursed with mythical ancestors who’ve sinned and brought the wrath of an angry God on every generation’s head.”
Ironically, these seven principles as a whole mirror precisely the principles that were embraced by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a pro-Marxist, revolutionary terrorist group of the 1970s. The symbol most identified with Kwanzaa consists of seven colored candles placed in a menorah-like candelabrum. These candles borrow their color scheme from Marcus Garvey’s old black nationalist ensign. The lone black candle represents the so-called “black race.” The three red candles evoke images of socialist realism with bloody red banners waving to rally the oppressed for the overthrow of the established order. And the three green candles are meant to recall the splendor of Africa’s landscapes. When Karenga first established Kwanzaa, he and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: “We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination.” The philosophy underlying Kwanzaa is known as Kawaida, a variation of classical Marxism that also includes enmity toward white people. Practitioners of Kawaida believe that one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances, and self-understanding” — just as Marxists identify class as the determining factor of one’s life conditions. The name “Kwanzaa” derives from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings, as noted above, all have Swahili names. But Swahili is an East African language, whereas the slaves who were brought to North America came from West Africa. In other words, Swahili has no historical relevance whatsoever for American blacks. Karenga nonetheless elected to build his holiday around Swahili terms because Swahili was the trendy language in the Black Power movement during the 1960s. Adapted from “The Truth about Kwanzaa,” by Tony Snow (December 31, 1999); “Kwanzaa: A Holiday Brought to You by the FBI,” by Ann Coulter (December 26, 2012); and “I’m Dreaming of a White Kwanzaa,” by Chris Griffith (December 22, 2000). READ MORE as Discover the Networks has an aggregated page full of useful articles on Kwanzaa HERE  ]]>