Search for roots of Kwanzaa leads back to the USA
By Malcolm A. Kline
When my wife and I were engaged a decade ago, I happened to see an ad for Kwanzaa on TV while she was out running errands. It held particular interest for me, since she (a native of Zimbabwe) and I (a Pennsylvania-bred son of a car appraiser) were about to create a truly African-American family. So, wanting to learn more about her cultural heritage, I later asked her about the African festival.
"Kwanzaa?" she replied." What is that?"
Two years later, Darryl, my stepson, was in fourth grade. When I came home one night, he showed me something he had brought from school. It was a thin piece of paper rolled into an oval with a circle of paper cut and placed on it like a lid, all of it taped together with little spots dotting it.
"What is it?" I asked. Darryl put it on his head and said, "It's my Kwanzaa hat."
"Did you make that?" my wife asked.
"No, my teacher made it for me after I told the class about Kwanzaa," Darryl said.
"But we don't celebrate Kwanzaa," my wife pointed out. "I still don't know what it is. Why did you talk to the class about it?"
A child's expertise
Darryl said, "My teacher asked me to. She said, 'Since you have just come to us from Africa, would you tell the class about the feast of Kwanzaa?' "
"What did you say?" my wife asked.
"I said what I heard on the TV commercial," Darryl answered.
The teacher is as white as I am.
Over the years, my wife's co-workers have frequently asked her about Kwanzaa, viewing her as an in-house expert. Unlike her son, my wife has never feigned expertise on the subject on demand.
So I decided to explore this festival and its heritage. After all, if it is, as the "official" Kwanzaa Web site claims, a "Pan-African holiday celebrated by millions throughout the world" that "brings a cultural message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense," surely others must know about it.
I asked a friend from Kenya. "No," he said, "we don't celebrate Kwanzaa in Kenya. I think that is an Ethiopian holiday." An Ethiopian acquaintance demurred, "I think that is a Tanzanian holiday." A Tanzanian said he thought it was Gambian. The Gambian believed it to be a holiday in Guinea-Bissau. "No," said my friend from Guinea-Bissau. " We don't celebrate Kwanzaa. I think that is a holiday in Kenya."
So where does that leave us? For my answer, I went to The Complete Kwanzaa by Detroit public school administrator Dorothy Winbush Riley. The first Kwanzaa celebration took place in Los Angeles in 1966. Maulana Karenga celebrated Kwanzaa that year with his family and friends, setting the dates for the observation between Christmas and New Year's Day.
What Kwanzaa means
Karenga, Riley writes, delineated Kwanzaa's core principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. "The core principles of Kwanzaa," Karenga said, "which I developed and proposed during the Black Cultural Revolution of the '60s (are) a necessary minimum set of principles by which black people must live in order to begin to rescue and reconstruct our history and our lives."
Karenga, arguably the father of Kwanzaa, repeatedly uses the word "African" to describe the holiday and borrows from the continent's languages to describe its foundations. Although I never got through to him, I did get an interesting response about Kwanzaa from the nice lady at the Black History Museum in Alexandria, Va.
"I would say you would find no African nations and one American nation celebrating Kwanzaa," she said.
Teaching the values Karenga lays out is certainly worthwhile, and he is right to argue that they are essential ingredients to living a healthy, happy, successful life. And if an annual festival helps reinforce them to an African-American audience, well that's fine, too. But can we please do my wife and my kids a favor and dispense with the claim that this festival has its roots anywhere but right here in the USA?
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia, a non-profit research group in Washington.
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