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:
Notably, 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.
Like Marxism, Kwanzaa 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.” B contrast, 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.”
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 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 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.
Sources: “The Truth about Kwanzaa,” by Tony Snow (December 31, 1999); “Kwanzaa: 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).
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