Kwanzaa: Fiction Masquerading As an African Holiday

By Linda Orlando

People around the world have celebrated Christmas in a variety of ways for over 2,000 years. Many cultures and heritages have special traditions that have been handed down through centuries. There are a multitude of holiday observances specific to certain groups of people, from special religious services to traditional music, stories, clothing, feasts, rituals, and other holiday observances practiced during the month of December. Such traditions and observances have been handed down from generation to generation, all around the world, over hundreds of years.

Many Americans believe that Kwanzaa is a similar cultural observance of Christmas that began in Africa and has been passed down through the generations. But that belief couldn’t be farther from the truth—Kwanzaa has existed for just 39 years. The holiday was invented by Ron Karenga, also known as Ron Everett, who was chairman of the black studies department at California State University, Long Beach, from 1989 to 2002. In 1984, he helped to develop the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, and in 1995, he helped organize the Million Man March. He is the director of the Kawaida Institute for Pan African Studies, and the author of several books, including Introduction to Black Studies, a black studies textbook.

Karenga’s professional bios often fail to mention another significant piece of his history—he is a convicted felon who served four years in prison for felonious assault, torture, and imprisonment of two of his female followers. In the mid-1960’s Karenga established himself as a leader of the black movement, intentionally calling himself a "cultural nationalist" to distinguish himself and his followers from the Black Panthers, who were Marxists. While the Marxists campaigned for integration, encouraging racial equality, Karenga’s purpose was to create a separate black state. His group and the Panthers constantly vied for control of the new African Studies Department at UCLA, and they were firmly at odds. Both groups began carrying guns on campus, and it was inevitable that the growing friction between the two would lead to violence. On January 17, 1969, about 150 students gathered in the lunchroom at UCLA to talk about the fact that two Panthers had been admitted to the college as part of a federal program to assist black high-school dropouts. In the midst of a heated discussion, the talks turned violent, and two of Karenga’s group shot and killed two Panthers.

After the shooting, Karenga’s group became even more brazen and violent, performing assaults and robberies, always adhering to the law laid down by Karenga himself in The Quotable Karenga, a book that presented the "True Path of Blackness." The seven tenets of that path are: think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black. So while many black Americans were crying out against racial discrimination, Karenga and his followers were stridently working to create a divide between the races, furthering animosity and racial discrimination.

On May 9, 1970, Karenga accused two women living in his house of secretly trying to kill him. When they denied his accusations, Karenga ordered them to remove their clothes, then he and three of his followers beat them with an electrical cord and put a hot soldering iron in the mouth of one of them. The other woman had her toe placed in a small vise, which was tightened until she screamed in agony. The torturers put detergent in the mouths of the women, turned a water hose full force on their faces, and Karenga threatened to shoot both of them. Karenga was convicted and sentenced to one to ten years in prison, but he served only four. After his release, he began referring to himself as "Maulana," the Swahili term for "master teacher." By 1979 he was running the Black Studies Department at UCLA and had purportedly converted to Marxism, changing the focus of his seven principles. He is still at UCLA and everyone has almost forgotten the cruel and vicious felonious attacks he committed on other black people, some of whom were his supporters.

When Karenga invented his seven-day feast of Kwanzaa, he branded it a black alternative to Christmas. According to the official Kwanzaa website (http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org), the celebration was designed to encourage "conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans," and offer a "reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resurrection, and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans' ancestors." The site presents the principles first in Swahili and then in English, and all of the festival’s trappings have Swahili names. And therein lies one of the first proofs that Kwanzaa is a fraudulent "holiday" designed to prey on the naivety of black Americans. Swahili is a language used in eastern African countries. Slaves were brought to America from the western shores of Africa.

Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots, and have all been created by Karenga and his black separatists. There is no culture on earth that celebrates a harvesting ritual in December. The pledges about human dignity sprinkled throughout the pledges of Kwanza have no relevance to African practices such as female circumcision and polygamy, both of which are still common across Africa. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t interested in black Americans celebrating any kind of return to their African heritage; they wanted to create an entirely new, separate culture for blacks in America.

The rituals associated with Kwanzaa celebrations don’t even make sense. Corn figures prominently in Kwanzaa rituals, yet corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and white colonialists carried the crop around the world with them. The continent of Africa itself isn’t unified in any way; in Kenya there exists centuries-old hostility between the various tribes. Kikuyu, Luhya, Masai, and others have no commonality or Ur-African culture of unity among them. Warlords control Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia, and Zaire, and genocidal maniacs have systematically murdered millions of black people in Rwanda, Uganda, and Ethiopia. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another regularly. Politics in African countries have more to do with controlling tribal animosities than overcoming ideological beliefs.

In his seminal book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, Keith Richburg writes: "Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh." He sums up the message of his book by saying, "I have been here, and I have seen—and frankly, I want no part of it…by an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today—my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires—derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact."

The white establishment in America has supported Karenga’s anti-white Christmas mission, both to capitalize on the money made from marketing and selling Kwanzaa materials, and also to patronize black activists and stifle them. When President Clinton signed the final Kwanzaa proclamation of his presidency, he said: ""The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity." The President of the United States, not to mention his speech writers, didn’t even know that Kwanzaa doesn’t celebrate one single facet of the "history and heritage of African Americans."

In crafting his fictional holiday, Karenga created a symbolic black flag and wrote a pledge to it: "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 God of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination." So rather than encouraging racial unity by celebrating a Christmas holiday that every race and culture in America can share in, Kwanzaa has helped to further polarize people and encourage separation of the races. Yet another step further away from peace on earth, goodwill to men.