Kwanzaa Principles Much Needed for African American Community Building
Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, California State University-Long Beach and Executive Director, African American Cultural Center, Los Angeles, Ca. created the Kwanzaa celebration to reinforce the basic values of African culture, called the Nguzo Saba which in Swahili means the Seven Principles, with hope that the seven principles of the festivity would serve as the building blocks to reinforce and enhance African American communities and culture.
Kwanzaa is in its 48th year.
· The seven principles include: Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
· Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
· Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems, and to solve them together.
· Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
· Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
· 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.
· 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.
While the events that have taken place on the west and south sides are important, the seven building blocks are what Dr. Karenga would also like Kwanzaa observers to embrace and carry into each year.
In his 2014 message to the public, Dr. Karenga states, “The celebration of Kwanzaa reminds us that our culture is our unique and equally valid and valuable way of being human in the world and it urges us to self-consciously celebrate and practice our culture, live its highest principles and pass this sacred legacy on to the future generation. This season of Kwanzaa, as we celebrate family, community and culture around the world and recommit ourselves to bringing and sustaining good in the world, we find ourselves deeply involved in the continuing quest and struggle for justice for our people. Indeed, it is an ongoing struggle to free ourselves and be ourselves as Black people, as an African people, and live the secure, good, fulfilling and meaningful lives we all want and deserve. This year in the midst of a rising tide of resistance against police violence, general systemic violence, and racial and social injustice, we remember and reaffirm Kwanzaa’s ancient and modern origins and the cultural views, values and practices which undergird and inform this global pan-African celebration.”
Kwanzaa has its earliest origins in the ancient first fruit or first harvest celebrations of Africa as a time of remembrance, reflection and recommitment, with a focus on the cooperative creation and sharing of good in the world.
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