The Kwanzaa Hoax
Kwanzaa is a hoax -- a hoax built around fake history and pseudohistorical delusions. By attempting to dignify and promote Kwanzaa in The American Nation, Prentice Hall has joined in a flim-flam.
This fake holiday was invented in 1966.
en.wikipedia.org
"Anywhere we are, Us is."
That looks like a line from an Amos 'N Andy show. One can easily imagine that it served as the motto of the Mystic Knights of the Sea, and that it was recited by such characters as The Kingfish, Andy Brown and Algonquin J. Calhoun.
In fact, however, the line that I have quoted is the motto of a real organization -- a real organization that was originally named United Slaves but now calls itself The Organization Us (or simply Us or US). It was created some 40 years ago, in Southern California, by a black racist who had begun life as Ron N. Everett but later had assumed the name Maulana Karenga.
Karenga -- known chiefly as the inventor of Kwanzaa, a fake "African" holiday that he contrived in 1966 -- has enjoyed a truly colorful career. He was a prominent black nationalist during the 1960s, when his organization was involved in various violent operations. He was sent to prison in 1971, after he and some of his pals tortured two women with a soldering iron and a vise, among other things. He emerged from prison in 1974, and a few years later -- in a maneuver that even The Kingfish might have found difficult -- he got himself installed as the chairman of the Department of Black Studies at California State University at Long Beach. CSULB wasn't the only American university that got the racial willies during the 1970s and set up a tin-pot black-studies department, but CSULB (as far as I know) was the only one that hired a chairman who was a violent felon.
Karenga is still working at CSULB and is still running The Organization Us, and he and Us are still promoting his proprietary holiday, Kwanzaa. Prentice Hall is promoting it too, so The American Nation displays a picture of "an American family's celebration of Kwanzaa" -- but The American Nation doesn't tell anything about Karenga, about his rules for carrying out a "celebration of Kwanzaa," or about his make-believe Africanism. Let me supply some of the information that Prentice Hall has hidden:
Kwanzaa is supposed to be celebrated from 26 December through 1 January: It competes with Christmas and Chanukah while incorporating some echoes of both, e.g., gift-giving and a ceremony built around a seven-holed candle-holder that recalls Judaism's seven-branched menorah.
Karenga has concocted some bits of lore, lingo, and mumbo-jumbo that are intended to make Kwanzaa look like something out of Africa instead of something from Los Angeles County, but his efforts have been feeble. If you scan The Official Kwanzaa Web Site [see note 1, below], you'll read that the origins of Kwanzaa lie in "the first harvest celebrations of Africa," which allegedly "are recorded in African history as far back as ancient Egypt and Nubia" -- but there is no explanation of why any ancient Egyptians or Nubians might have held harvest festivals around the time of the winter solstice, and there is no identification of the crops that they harvested. Karenga's formula for celebrating Kwanzaa requires the use of two ears of maize -- but maize is a New World plant, and it wasn't known at all in ancient Africa.
True believers can purchase ears of maize and other Kwanzaa equipment (e.g., candles and seven-holed candle-holders and straw mats) from the University of Sankore Press, a company in Los Angeles. This outfit evidently is controlled by Us and serves as Us's marketing unit. It isn't a university press, and its name is a mockery. The so-called University of Sankore was an aggregation of Islamic schools that flourished at Timbuktu in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. No University of Sankore exists today.
In Karenga's Kwanzaa-lingo, ears of maize are called by the Swahili name "muhindi." In fact, all the objects that Karenga has worked into Kwanzaa have names taken from Swahili, which The Official Kwanzaa Web site describes as "a Pan-African language" and "the most widely spoken African language." The labeling of Swahili as a "Pan-African" language is rubbish. Swahili -- a Bantu tongue that includes many words absorbed from Arabic, from Persian and from certain Indian languages -- is spoken by some 50 million people (i.e., about 7% of Africa's population). Most of those Swahili-speakers are concentrated in eastern Africa, in a region that includes Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and a strip of Zaire. The language which is used most widely in Africa is Arabic; and indeed, Swahili was originally written in Arabic script [note 2].
Kwanzaa is a hoax -- a hoax built around fake history and pseudohistorical delusions. By attempting to dignify and promote Kwanzaa in The American Nation, Prentice Hall has joined in a flim-flam.
William J. Bennetta
textbookleague.org
In truth the peoples of Africa have never been unified, and it’s dishonest to suggest otherwise. They’ve waged war among themselves for centuries, since long before the arrival of white colonists or slave traders. Even today Hutus and Tutsis routinely massacre one another for no particular reason. Genocides have wiped out millions in Rwanda and Ethiopia, and warlords rule in Somalia and Liberia. (The latter was established by freed American slaves, a formerly oppressed group who quickly became oppressors.) Mostly it’s not about disagreements over political issues. It’s the Hatfields and the McCoys, ancient rivalries where no one remembers what they were fighting about in the first place.
This false sense of unity is apparent even in the name of the holiday. The term “kwanzaa” (though not truly a word in itself) comes from Swahili, which Everett calls “the most widely spoken African language.” Another lie: Swahili is common in only a few countries, all of which have at least one other major language. And they’re all on or near the east coast, whereas almost all American slaves were snatched from the West. Further, the language isn’t uniquely African; about a third of the vocabulary is borrowed from Arabic (which, by the way is the most common language in Africa).
So exactly what aspect of Kwanzaa is distinctly African, that it should hold special significance for Americans descended from the continent? Hard to say.
Everett calls it a “pan-African” holiday. Not quite. Large-scale observances there are rare. In many isolated tribal areas, the people don’t even know or care who their national leaders are. Will they really set aside their centuries-old traditions and embrace a new holiday brought by a foreigner?
They call it a harvest festival, but no farmer anywhere gathers crops in December. It uses the symbol of corn, but this grain has absolutely no cultural significance in Africa. It’s indigenous to Mexico, and no place else on earth.
Everett envisioned Kwanzaa as a black alternative to Christmas, a white man’s holiday based on a white man’s religion. He’s misinformed: The Christian faith thrived in Africa long before it became a major force in Europe. It appears that John Mark (author of the second Gospel) established a congregation in Alexandria, and some of our greatest theologians (Augustine, Clement, Irenaeus, Athanasius) served as leaders of African churches in the first few centuries. The Islamic invaders (and their forced conversions) didn’t arrive until the seventh.
A proper celebration requires a wine glass that greatly resembles a chalice that might be used for the Lord’s Supper, and a seven-stemmed candlestick that could easily be mistaken for a Hanukkah menorah. And then there’s the flag. Again quoting the website, “The colors of the Kwanzaa flag are the colors of the Organization Us, black, red and green.”
Never heard of Organization Us? It’s a Black Nationalist group, established by Everett in 1965 as a rival to the Black Panthers. They preach the superiority of all things African, believing that black folks should separate themselves from non-blacks, and only patronize black businesses. And the partisans of this contrived holiday don’t even attempt to distance themselves from this racist philosophy.
Ultimately the tragedy of Kwanzaa, or of Black Nationalism, is that they will never achieve the ends that they seek. No one has ever empowered a downtrodden people by inventing a false heritage for them. No society has ever advanced itself by embracing a self-identity based on eternal victimhood. And will they ever reconcile with the white population of our nation? Their fiery rhetoric and exclusivist teachings seem to imply that they don’t even desire to try.
Their loss.
northstarwriters.com
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