KWANZAA INFUSING COMMUNITY WITH CULTURAL MEMORY, MOVEMENT & MOMENTUM

Kwanzaa, celebrated from December 26th to January 1st, provides a designated time to collectively celebrate our ancestral origin and to share the riveting beauty of African culture, its values, insights, and instructive practices so we can deeply rejuvenate our lives, families, and community for mutual flourishing and benefit. 

By Bakari Sanyu

How do African Americans collectively express our ethnicity as an African people? How do we express a deep rootedness in African culture and consciousness that crosses various countries, religions, classes, ages, generations and political persuasions on a common ground of ethical values? What African heritage tradition functions to renew and strengthen the intertwined, cherished, and indivisible values of family, community, and culture in a rich and meaningful way?

Kwanzaa, celebrated from December 26th to January 1st, provides a designated time to collectively celebrate our ancestral origin and to share the riveting beauty of African culture, its values, insights, and instructive practices so we can deeply rejuvenate our lives, families, and community for mutual flourishing and benefit. Since the 1960’s African American families and communities across the USA, have persistently presented the Kwanzaa season as a vehicle for collective gatherings overflowing with the richness and festive cultural ambience of enriching ethnic art, dance, poetry, folktales, music, cuisine, literature, and the beauty of heritage clothing, heirlooms, hairstyles, jewelry, crafts, and expansive creative productions. Now the annual cultural celebration has spread all around the world and is evident throughout various locations in North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean Islands, Europe, Asia, and in Africa.

The Kwanzaa cultural tradition was created and framed by Dr. Maulana Karenga in Los Angeles, California within the midst and context of the 1960’s African American Freedom Movement. And as the creator of Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Karenga is the author of the definitive text on its origins, principles, practices, symbols, and meaning. Take time to learn and relearn more information about Kwanzaa and then share the beauty of its values, insights, and instructive practices throughout our community. The cultural publication is readily available at www.sankorepress.com and a comprehensive reading will provide considerable detailed explanations.

The name Kwanzaa comes from the Kiswahili phrase, matunda ya kwanza, where matunda means “fruits”, and ya kwanza means “first”. Dr. Karenga added the extra “a” to the Kiswahili word kwanza, to distinguish the cultural tradition’s name. The language of Kiswahili was chosen for the name Kwanzaa and for all its accompanying phrases, because it is the most widely spoken African continental trade language used among African countries. And the year-end observance of Kwanzaa occurs because this cultural expression is derived from the African continent’s traditional year-end agricultural harvest celebrations.

The cultural celebration serves to restore and reinforce rootedness in our African heritage, culture, and consciousness, as well as functions to strengthen, maintain, and reaffirm our interconnected family, community, and cultural bonds. The annual tradition brings us together to focus on and recommit to develop, contribute to, manifest, maintain, continue, uplift, preserve, expand, and propel forward much more organized cultural memory, Movement, and momentum for our future generations.

This beautiful cultural model of possibility and cultural excellence created by Dr. Maulana Karenga, reminds our communities that we have the collective capacity, duty, and wherewithal to change the prevailing conditions of our lives with cultural memory, if we diligently practice more cultural values, focused priorities, organization, commitment, and continuous empowered action.

Kwanzaa honors the moral responsibility and awesome obligation we have to remember our esteemed Ancestors, who through their love, labor, and struggle, laid the foundation for us and pushed our lives and history forward, and on whose collective shoulders we now stand. The thrust of the annual cultural tradition is to continually strive to build, strengthen, maintain, and reaffirm our family, community, and cultural bonds with deliberate actions that expand more excellence, willingness, intentionality, capability, clarity, integrity, trust, confidence, togetherness, wellness, cooperation, commitment, empowerment, productivity and progress. And the annual celebration serves as a reminder to our community in all of its historical, geographical, and current diversity to continue to embrace, embody, build on, contribute to, maintain, manifest, and expand a dignified cultural legacy as a collective way of functioning in the world.

Our overall condition will change when enough individuals and families embrace, nurture, support, teach, and institutionalize self-knowledge to transform their self- image, as well as persistently work to intentionally practice more overarching cultural values. Relearn OUR story, manifest priorities to restore cultural names to ourselves, organizations, commemorations, programs, festivals, ceremonies, and events, decorate with self-reflective heritage imagery, and continually patronize our community newspaper and many more Black owned businesses, so we can sustain a collective economic base. Join a grassroots community cultural organization and purposely act to be a dependable, responsible, financially contributing, reliable, and committed Member (NOT a random drop-in, drop-by, drop-out, drop-off “best wishes for continued success”, half-in, half-out, loitering, peripheral, spectating, idle, hand-waving bystander).

The heart and soul of the Kwanzaa cultural tradition revolves around Seven Principles. The Kiswahili term for all Seven Principles is the Nguzo Saba. This minimum set of ethical values addresses what cultural integrity challenges our community faces and how to successfully deal with the cultural challenges. The overarching context is intended to reinvigorate the passion, necessity, urgency, and priority of propelling OURstory’s collective consciousness forward. There is one principle to focus on during each day of the 7-day Kwanzaa cultural celebration.

The Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) stated here in both Kiswahili and English, are as follows with brief explanations:

 Umoja (Unity)

To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race 

This is a call to coalesce, focus, and purposely act and commit to persistently practice working harmoniously together in our family, community, and culture for collective empowerment.

 Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)

To define ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined, named, created for, and spoken for by others

This is a call to persistently reclaim, value, respect, embrace, embody, and restore the best of our history, heritage, and culture so we can think for, empower, and work to develop ourselves according to our own dignity affirming needs and priorities.

 Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)

To build and maintain our community together and to make our sisters and brothers problems, our problems, and to solve them together

This is a call to commit to each other in destiny and duty, and to consistently work towards improving and better sustaining our family, community, cultural conditions and varying capacities, as well as our future possibilities.

 Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)

To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from together

This is a call to build, expand, and persistently patronize community vendors, stores, shops, businesses, entrepreneurs, and companies to establish a vital financial base for funding and sustaining more collective development and infrastructure ownership.

 Nia (Purpose)

To make as our collective vocation the building and developing of our community, in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness

This is a call to commit to an overarching dedication directed towards embracing, embodying, and practicing building more family, community, and cultural unity as a way of life, so we can restore widespread self-respect, progress, trust, wellbeing, and collective productivity.

 Kuumba (Creativity)

To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it

This is a call to introduce and develop original, innovative, and inventive productions that are always socially purposeful, dignified, regenerative, and uplifting.

 Imani (Faith)

To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle

This is a call to rise and be a transformative agent of change and to manifest service, empathy, healing, goodness, social engagement, and inspiration as a way of life, so we can create a better and more beautiful world than what we have inherited.

Our Kwanzaa cultural tradition functions as a source of collective identity, purpose, direction, and consciousness. For as our esteemed Ancestor, Nana “Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer” taught, “there are two things we should always care about, never to forget where we came from and to always praise the bridges that carried us over”. The message and meaning of Kwanzaa are intended to continually

invigorate and preserve a cultural foundation for uplifting our family and community with self-defining and self-confirming bedrock principles derived from tradition, reason, and history.

Our esteemed Ancestor, Nana “Dr. Frantz Fanon” has said that we must ask ourselves three culturally rooted questions:

• Who Am I?

• Am I Really Who I Say I Am?

• Am I All That I Ought To Be?

The collective answers to these three questions will determine the extent of how each of us chooses to function as a cultural representative of our people throughout the year. Therefore, let’s work together and apply and practice our ethical cultural values, tell our unique complex narrative, present uplifting dignified self-imagery, promote positive social cohesion, patience, courtesy, friendliness, cooperation, and harmony, and continually reject, challenge, and eliminate self-destructive, self-debasing, and self-erasure conditioning behaviors which result from cultural alienation and historical amnesia.

More importantly, remember that our year-round practice of the Nguzo Saba requires us to sustain a profound sense of kinship with and among each other. Do something purposely, collectively, dependably, organized, dignified, consistently, and reoccurring in community. Uplift, empower, and expand much more excellence, activity, interconnections, clarity, integrity, trust, cultural knowledge restoration practices, community bonding involvement, focused organizing, cooperative wealth generation, independent cultural institution building work, skilled trades development, infrastructure ownership, and cultural competence. We are our own Cultural Liberators, Ambassadors and Advocates.

There will be a Kwanzaa Celebration for our community-at-large on Friday, December 27, 2024, from 1 pm to 5 pm, at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, located at 1000 S. Owens Street, Bakersfield, California. African heritage attire is strongly emphasized to proudly embody, honor, elevate, and support the essence, ambience, purpose, and ethnic imagery of our cultural tradition. Public Admission is FREE and our entire community is cordially invited to enjoy the annual festive cultural event.

Heri za Kwanzaa (Happy Kwanzaa)

5Bakari Sanyu

Director, The Sankofa Collective

A community-based cultural education organization

Telephone Number: (661) 319-7611

email: [email protected]