Crishuana & Co.

Tag: Maulana Karenga

Day 5. Nia, #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)

With Kwanzaa, questions of ownership and representation by Blacks and Of Blacks are reconstructed as was the case for the original Emancipation Celebrations. As in previous black holidays, Black Americans hoped that one of the many commemorations on the calendar would make them culturally visible on the national level as had other white immigrant holidays had done. After repeated disappointments, they found the exclusion disappointing. There were certainly enough opportunities. On February 1st, 1948, the bill signing National Freedom Day as a nationally recognized holiday was put into law commemorating the Thirteenth Amendment against the backdrop of the MLB’s acceptance of Jackie Robinson.

Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History Week become a month long observance at the national bicentennial celebration in the mid-1970s. The adoption of Negro History Month was challenged by blacks as too commercialized and no longer representative of the current desires for an African Heritage Month in August. The third publicly recognized black holiday came immediately upon Dr. King’s death. A resolution was introduced to nationally commemorate the assignation with House bill to designate his birthday on January 15th as a “legal public” holiday. Resultantly, celebrations caused conflict with those, who believed Malcolm X deserved an and innovative overdue for a similar celebration on May 19th. Dr. King’s holiday was mainly advocated for by politicians and by mainstream civil rights organizations and leaders.

The hostile response of the US government caused the decline of Black Power nation-wide at the end of the 1970s, but Kwanzaa’s enormous publicity campaign in black urban neighborhoods represented the continued relevance of the cultural movement in at the local community level. Local Kwanzaa community organizing served as cultural educational sites, often by way of parades, community workshops and neighborhood forums. The grassroots structure re-positioned the black media as once again integral to sharing information. Both movement and non-movement sympathizers disseminated promotional coverage generated by black newspapers and magazines.

Black TV personalities began morning shows with the Nguzo Saba seven principles. Essence, Ebony and Jet magazines produced elaborate spreads about Kwanzaa. Pre-ceremonies even developed in some expressions for the earlier weeks of December before the first day of Kwanzaa. Often these ceremonies were held to help educate and de-mystify the holiday and these ceremonies provided an access point for blacks that did not interact with the local black nationalists organizations. From these points of nexus, the anti-Christmas rhetoric was soon dropped as it hindered prominent black religious leaders and their communities from participating and promoting the cultural exchange.

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 31, 2017
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