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Day 4. Ujamaa, #CELEBRATE, Ch. 3

/ We don’t borrow
from Africa,
we utilize
that which was ours
2 start with.
The culture
provides a basis
4 revolution
+ recovery. / -Maulana Karenga

(7 Days of Kwanzaa. 7 Excerpts from Chapter 3 of a forthcoming essay series, #CELEBRATE: Meditations on a Black Festive Culture)

Chapter 3. Reincarnation: “KWANZAA”

Day 4. Ujamaa

This is an investigation of the black nostalgia. Within Kwnazaa is the re-imagining and performing of Africa, but not as an appropriation but as a way to overcome African-American’s tangled and confusing ethnic origins.

Let’s take it back. At the time of Emancipation Celebrations, Africa was respected as an ancient glory but also devalued through the colonial lens transposed upon them. Civilizationism pervaded black discourses, advocating for Christianizing and Westernizing of Mother Africa. There were hints of a Pan-Africanist light within the Negritude movement. The resulting increase in scholarship of black historians and black experience abroad began to shift this consciousness. Slowly African-Americans lifted the veiled so they could see the value of African contributions, but elitism and Communist fears of the early twentieth century covered their eyes again. These small murmurings of a pan-African glory were squashed until the grand independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s. This time, Africa re-emerged as a source of cultural knowledge for good.

Inspired by the African revolution and independence movements, Black Power advocates followed the lead of Malcolm X. They truly began to imagine a collective African diaspora that could inform and empower their own liberation from white American oppression. Africa was rising, which validated a black cultural liberation and gave them permission to connect to the Continent as their roots. A primary goal of the Black Power movement became reimagining blackness through the performance of “Africa.” Author Robert Mayes gives a useful insight, observing “that to think, act, talk, look and be black would mean to perform it, to display it, to visualize it, to manifest and actualize ‘blackness’ and ‘African-ness’ in some capacity.”

For Black Nationalists, Ahmed Sékou Touré’s 1959 work, Toward Full Re-Africanization became the blueprint for a process of Africanization. This process included Africanizing one’s speech with slang and African language terms, primarily Swahili as well as some hand gestures. Specifically, the US Organization employed Kiswahili terms to represent the organizations different components.
The paramilitary wing was called “Simba.” The School of Afro-American Culture was called “Mwalimu” and so on.
Taking on Swahili names was a way to identify your past experiences with the continent. “Kwanzaa” means “first fruits” of the harvest in Swahili.

There were also behavioral stipulations for Africanizing weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals. Members were required to wear Afros and African attire.
Within its strict doctrine, attempt to “re-Africanize” social relations based on “tradition and reason.” The organization drew in many young previous gang members who were politicized after the Watts riots, adding a level of violent rhetoric to the organization’s culture.
Further Some of the rules and adopted behaviors perpetuated chauvinist ideals and caused internal struggle. Beyond legal and external issues with polygamy, Kerenga’s exhaustive philosophy and his cult of personality became the source of repeated disagreements over the authenticity of African representation within the US Organization.
The same question plagues the holiday until today, some 50 years later.

(4/7)

All wax prints from post titles and Instagram are available for order from @HouseOfMamiWata African fabrics shop in Houston, TX.

Many blessings, fam &

Habari Gani until tomorrow,

C.

December 30, 2017
Day 3. Ujima, #CELEBRATE, Ch. 3

/ We don’t borrow
from Africa,
we utilize
that which was ours
2 start with.
The culture
provides a basis
4 revolution
+ recovery. / -Maulana Karenga

(7 Days of Kwanzaa. 7 Excerpts from Chapter 3 of a forthcoming essay series, #CELEBRATE: Meditations on a Black Festive Culture)

Chapter 3. Reincarnation: “KWANZAA”
Day 3: Ujima

Maulana Karenga declined to join the NAACP, CORE and the Nation of Islam despite a personal invitation from Malcolm X himself. Instead he decided to join the nationalist-oriented, Afro-American Association. Here he developed and shaped his ideologies. He began learning under African liberation leaders, who based their beliefs on the premise that blacks needed to have the power to define themselves. For Kerenga, this concept finally moved beyond the scope of the Civil Rights protest strategies. Three years later, in the fall of 1965, a study group in a meeting in a Los Angeles bookstore called the Circle of Seven developed into the US organization. The name was proposed as a dual reference to the United States and to, “serve us Blacks as opposed to them Whites.”

The members, Karenga, his wife and five others were close followers of Malcolm X, rallying around a strong belief that his death deserved to be memorialized in a national celebration. In fact, this is the first sprouting of what would become the group’s holidaymaking tradition. The US Organization got into formation under the leadership of a Malcolm X associate, by the name of Hakim Jamal, who later left the organization and went on to found the Malcolm X Foundation. Shifting into a new leadership of Maulana Karenga, the group’s emphasis on creating a cultural tradition blossomed. Kwanzaa allowed the Black Nationalists to exercise ritual, fusing the lived and imagined disapproval experience together as one.

Historian Scot Brown in his 2003 work, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism, explains that Karenga’s Seven Year Calendar “followed a pattern of long-range social and economic planning schemes, popularized by Third World nationalists and socialists during the late 1950s and 1960s.” With Kuzaliwa on May 19th, Malcolm X’s birthday and Dhabihu in February to represent Malcolm X’s martyrdom, the revolutionary alternatives inspired an entirely new calendar with a system of holidays and rituals for members and ultimately all Blacks.

Karenga understood that cultural revolutions preceded physical revolutions and were, therefore, crucial stages of the revolution because they created the necessary foundation of identity, purpose and direction. Then, after an existential crisis with Christmas and the over-commercialization of a white Jesus, Karenga challenged the motives of Black Christianity, in an address to Valley College in 1968. He commented, “Black people can’t be Christians because if we are going to be Christians then we must be Jesus-like and Jesus was a whitey. We are going to have to defend ourselves because we are not going to get defense from heaven.”

Kwanzaa was created to resist against white holiday representation. Plain and simple. In an article in 1977, Karenga clarified, “I created Kwanzaa in 1966 with US organization: a social change group of Blacks dedicated to the creation, re-creation, and circulation of Black culture. Kwanzaa is not a Black Christmas and not a time for expensive gift giving. It is an effort to escape this entrapment.” The agitation against Christmas is important for many Black Nationalists who often understand the religious holiday as “the handmaiden of a pathological Negro identity.” As a result, in its earlier forms and to outside observers, white and black alike, Kwanzaa as a ritual tradition appeared cultish and inauthentic.

But, for the members it was a cultural revolution.

(3/7)

All wax prints from post titles and Instagram are available for order from @HouseOfMamiWata African fabrics shop in Houston, TX.

Many blessings, fam &

Habari Gani until tomorrow,

C.

December 29, 2017
Day 2. Kujichagulia, #CELEBRATE, Ch. 3

/ We don’t borrow
from Africa,
we utilize
that which was ours
2 start with.
The culture
provides a basis
4 revolution
+ recovery. / -Maulana Karenga

(7 Days of Kwanzaa. 7 Excerpts from Chapter 3 of a forthcoming essay series, #CELEBRATE: Meditations on a Black Festive Culture)

Chapter 3. Reincarnation: “KWANZAA”
Day 2: Kujichagulia

Like black holidaymakers before it, this twentieth century holiday tradition struggled with questions of legitimacy.

Explicitly targeting the calendar as a site of spatial negotiation, the creators of Kwanzaa and the Black Protest Calendar recast American holidays as white-centric extensions of Jim Crow exclusion. The New Black Power consciousness shifted from the patterns earlier black holidays established in the Antebellum and Progressive Eras. Black Power era holidays demanded recognition of the Afro-centric experience first and instead, created traditions around the ways mainstream white culture had failed it. The Black Protest Calendar sought to commemorate that fact that blacks were still not fully equal citizens instead of tacking their experience on to America’s mythology. They aimed to present celebrations that intentionally exposed how America’s freedoms and claims of morality were both false and ahistorical. You see, Kwanzaa was not rooted in a historical moment, but was a deliberate Black Nationalist response to their inability to identify with the cultural narrative of American festive calendar. Kwanzaa was created to be and still is, an active criticism of mainstream American celebrations.

Beyond creating observances which challenged white holidays, the Black Protest Calendar based its memory building on cultural events more relevant to the emerging consciousness. Progressive era and Antebellum black celebrations primarily included personality holidays such as Booker T Washington’s Birthday, Ida B Wells Day and a day for Frederick Douglass. Black Nationalists aimed to update these observances to include recent traumatic events, while continuing the tradition of celebrating race heroes. For example, the Black Protest Calendar includes observances for the assassinations of Dr. King and Malcolm X.

The second aim of this expression of the Black Holiday Tradition was to place “anti-holidays” alongside mainstream holidays, challenging the inclusivity of American celebrations, including Thanksgiving, Election Day and, Columbus Day. But, most significantly for understanding Kwanzaa was that the BPC reincarnated a Pan-Africanist consciousness into the existing black holidays. Freedom Day was abandoned as the original observance. Emancipation Day was resurrected as a celebration of black freedom which was now aligned with African independence struggles against colonialism on the Continent.

Foundations of Kwanzaa can be said to have seeded in 1970 and 1971, when community organizer Edward Simms, Jr. created a Black Nationalist holiday called Umoja Karamu. Umoja Karamu was an attempt to renegotiate Thanksgiving. By holding it on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the holiday became a way to reverse the “misgiving” of the holiday. It was also a holiday of feast and family, but it challenged European ideas of unity and proposed a more Afro-centric understanding. The celebration promoted harmony and was based on five major historical periods in the black American experience. During the feast, families presented historical readings, honored ancestors and shared foods that represented the five colors linked to the five historical periods. This pattern germinates in another Black Nationalist holiday established in this period: African Liberation Day. Founded by the great Kwame Nkrumah in 1958, it was adopted in America in 1963. By the 1970s, was considered to be one of the most widely celebrated black holidays on the calendar. Though it was African in its foundation, upon its adoption by newly Afro-centric Americans, it maintained the Protest Calendar tradition of American holiday critique. It is observed on the May 27th date, placing it right next to Memorial Day. This date placement was a direct challenge to American commercial and military involvement with oppressive colonial governments on the Continent.

It is no wonder Kwanzaa is such a powerful expression of black American creativity because Maulana Kerenga, Kwanzaa’s creator and leader of the US organization in the late 1960s lived as a reinvention himself. During the Black Power era, “cultural recovery” was not simply at the holiday level, but it was also manifested in individuals who strived to embody the Afro-centric ideals of the era. Born Ronald McKinley Everett, he changed his name to a more “authentically African” name. Similarly his careful study of Swahili and Arabic showed that he, like, Paul Robeson before him, believed that African languages were a deep source of cultural pride and knowledge. Kerenga went on to earn multiple graduate level degrees in Swahili and African cultural studies. Author of Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition, Professor Keith A. Mayes refers to this process as cultural recovery, which he describes as, “The mere fact that “African-ness” had to be recaptured, re-donned, re-inculcated, and re-received meant that “Africa” at the level of geography, identity and consciousness had to be invented or re-invented by black Americans for black Americans.” For Mayes, Kerenga’s redefinition is inseparable from his political ideologies and invention of Kwanzaa.
Performing Black Nationalism was inherent in his expression of self-identity.

(2/7)

All wax prints from post titles and Instagram are available for order from @HouseOfMamiWata African fabrics shop in Houston, TX.

Sending you many blessings, family &

Habari Gani until tomorrow,

C.

December 28, 2017