Kwanzaa: Black Christmas

After Hanukkah and Christmas comes Kwanzaa, the last of the United States’ end-of-year holidays. It begins on Dec. 26 and ends on Jan. 1. The main symbol of Kwanzaa is a candle holder with seven candles. The first night, families light the black candle. The next day, the red, then the green, and so on for seven days. Black, green, red: the colors of pan-African nationalism.

Even though Kwanzaa (“first fruits”) resembles a black Christmas, it is a cultural, not religious, celebration. It was invented in 1966 in Los Angeles, a year after the Watts race riots, by black power militant Maulana Karenga. At first, many believed that it was a traditional African holiday. But in spite of its Swahili (the chosen language of black radicals) name, they couldn’t escape the truth. Kwanzaa is largely unknown in the Southern hemisphere. In 44 years, the holiday has nevertheless created followers in the entire African diaspora and in the Caribbean. The “mother house,” so to speak, based in Los Angeles, ensures that Kwanzaa has about 30 to 40 million followers throughout the world. Some 2 million of these are black Americans.

In the 1970s, Maulana Karenga and his comrades were revolting against the omnipresence of white culture, which was Eurocentric even in its celebration of Christmas. They wanted to pick up the lost thread with the African continent. As Professor Keith Mayes recalls in a 2009 book on the creation of Kwanzaa, it was the period when blacks tried to impose an alternative calendar: a “unity holiday” on the Sunday after Thanksgiving; a black Valentine’s Day (Black Love Day) on Feb. 13; and an “African Holocaust” Day on the Sunday before Columbus Day, in October.

Only Kwanzaa survived. The holiday has never become universal, and in the black middle class, many find it incongruous to put on a colored boubou to celebrate the first harvest (in mid-winter?). Young people do not see the relationship between their lifestyle and an African wisdom of which they currently find no traces.

But Kwanzaa has been adopted without reluctance by the government, media, schools, churches and museums, in a great impetus of multiculturalism that “canonized” the original revolt, to use Professor Michael Eric Dyson’s word. Since 1997, Kwanzaa has had its commemorative stamp. Each institution has the duty to program an event (“Kwanzaa 2010: The Legacy Continues,” declares the August Museum of Natural History in New York this week, which is also offering a sweet potato menu in the cafeteria).

Hallmark makes special Kwanzaa cards, and the day after Christmas — in the black neighborhoods of Denver or Dallas — the giant kinara (candle holders) are lit while children dance to the sounds of percussion. Jan. 1 is the day of gifts. But to escape the consumerism of Christmas and the “alienation” of shopping, the gifts are supposed to be homemade, with the exception of books — the only present that can be purchased.

As Bill Clinton and George Bush did before him, Barack Obama offered his greetings on Dec. 26 to “all those who are celebrating Kwanzaa,” taking care to note the seven principles that define the celebration: unity (Umoja); self-determination (Kujichagulia) — each person is master of his destiny; collective work and responsibility (Ujima) — putting resources in common; cooperative economics (Ujamaa) — profiting the entire community; purpose (Nia) — each must discover his mission in life, preferably useful to the community; creativity (Kuumba) and faith (Imani) — faith in self, in family and in the rightness of the cause. …

Kwanzaa is only one of the dates that blacks have succeeded in conquering on the American calendar. In January (the third Monday) comes the celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday. It is a federal holiday, which required more than 20 years of perseverance. February is Black History Month. Under pressure from militants, who thought black contributions were insufficiently represented in the United States Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, Jimmy Carter agreed to prolong what had been only a single week since 1926 (Negro History Week).

The final symbolic date: Juneteenth, June 19. It commemorates the 1865 Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, when Gen. Gordon Granger had to come enforce the order of abolition signed by Lincoln three years earlier, but about which Texans could care less.

Celebrated since the end of slavery as the holiday of black independence, Juneteenth had fallen into oblivion before being revived at the end of the 1960s and then again under Bill Clinton. Today it is officially celebrated in 36 states. Organizations hope to obtain federal recognition due to the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, in April 2011. The “black 4th of July” would then officially enter the American calendar.