Posted on 12/19/2008 5:51:12 AM PST by flowerplough
Lubna Muhammad has celebrated Kwanzaa for more than 30 years.
"Kwanzaa is more than a holiday--[it's] a culture that should be applied to everyday life," says Muhammad, owner of Top Shelf Plus in Newark, N.J.
Muhammad says she began observing Kwanzaa because she felt its core message spoke to both her culture and spirit.
"When you go to work, you need umoja every day--that's unity. You need unity with your coworkers," she says.
Muhammad isn't alone. More than 30 million people in America celebrate Kwanzaa, according to a spokesperson from the African American Cultural Center.
Kwanzaa, which means "first fruits of the harvest" in Swahili, was created in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, a professor at California State University at Long Beach, to reinforce positive values and strengthen bonds within the Black community.
But the holiday isn't just for Blacks--people of all races celebrate Kwanzaa.
(Excerpt) Read more at diversityinc.com ...
“Diversity Inc.” kind of says it all.
Wanna bet?
Could some please repost the history of Kwanza article? the one about the drug addict cad driver
LOL! I know no one who celebrates “Kwanzaa”. Black or White.
Festivus for the rest of us.
A slightly different interpretation...
http://exposingtheleft.blogspot.com/2008/12/that-kwazy-kwanzaa.html
From James Deermore, a missionary in Africa for 30+ years:
One of the most insulting things which has ever been foisted upon Americans, especially black Americans, is the entirely fraudulent “traditional African holiday” called “Kwanzaa” by its inventor and principal perpetrator.
Ron Karenga (Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, promoting it as a black alternative to Christmas. He supposedly wanted to end what he considered the Christmas season exploitation of African Americans. In reality, I believe it was just one of the early salvos in America in the increasingly shrill efforts by many to denigrate Christianity, and remove it entirely from public discourse or display.
If you go to the official Kwanzaa Web site, as I did, you will see that the celebration was instigated to foster “conditions that would enhance revolutionary social change (notice the typical socialist/communist rhetoric) for the masses of Black Americans” and provide a “reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (and way of life) utilized by Black Americans’ ancestors.”
Karenga propounded the following seven “principles”: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. He designates one day during Kwanzaa week for each principle. He and his followers made up a flag for black nationalism and a pledge: “We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one God of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination.”
And thus he goes back to the old “Black Nation Separatism” which wants to “secede from the Union,” and set up a separate black nation in parts of what is now the United States. But when we really begin to examine the “Kwanzaa Traditional Black African Holiday” we find immediately that every part of it is fraudulent — It comes only from the imagination of Karenga and his associates.
Even the name is fraudulent. It comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have been given Swahili names - - - such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.
But Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Nearly all of the slaves in slave trading days were taken from West Africa, (usually by Arab slave hunters/traders, with the connivance of some of the black chiefs and/or tribes of West Africa, and largely but not exclusively hauled away in British ships). Therefore, Swahili as an East African tongue, has absolutely no ancestral connection to most American blacks, nor to most other blacks anywhere in the world who descended from slaves.
As Tony Snow said in a column he wrote some years back, “the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “God Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the cultural deception in Kwanzaa using Swahili.”
And even more destructive to the idea of Kwanzaa as a “traditional African holiday or festival, the ceremonies invoked for Kwanzaa have no African roots of any kind, from East or West Africa.
You will not find any African culture, East or West, which celebrates a harvesting ritual in December. And all the talk about human dignity does not fit well with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy (even slavery in some African countries).
So Karenga and his co-inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to African roots; they were simply promoting Marxism. They used the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyerere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms. These “collective farms” were a massive failure, and their principal production capability was cultivating misery, rather than defeating hunger.
Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Since corn is not indigenous to Africa, every Kwanzaa ritual using it is contrary to any traditional African culture. Indians developed corn, and the crop was then carried worldwide by white colonialists.
The fact is, there is no universal “African” culture. Instead there are many “tribal cultures”. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport, as we have seen recently.
If you go to Africa and stay long enough, and live among the tribal people for years, as I have, you will see constant “tribal racism.” Even in Kenya, you will see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. In most African countries, their divisions have always been based more on tribal animosities than on ideology. I can attest from my own 33 years in African tribal missions work that most tribes hate most other tribes, and have little or no use for them.
True. It can be a holiday for Communists all over the world.
Yes, I remember the other day, Rabbi Shmuley telling everyone to "Give it up for the beginning of Kwaanza, dawgs."
kwan-za-duh is a d@mn joke!
Oh please!!! Kwanzaa is STILL a made up “holiday” for the ignorant who have been brainwashed to believe that it is a real African celebration. It’s not and they might as well get over it.
If people are going to “celebrate” Kwanzaa”, we might as well officially acknowledge Festivus. They’re both from the same mold.
My brother and I celebrate Kwanzaa every year.
Of course, we treat it like April Fools’ Day, but we get a lot of laughs out of it. Probably not what the creator intended.
Cholera patients in Zimbabwe have been dying of thirst in a government clinic as bodies pile up around them.
By Sebastien Berger, Southern Africa Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:26PM GMT 19 Dec 2008
The "grim" discovery at a government-run cholera treatment centre in Chegutu, south of Harare, was made by the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres, which found patients with no supply of food or even water.
"Dead people were lying everywhere," said Luis Maria Tello, MSF's medical co-ordinator in Chegutu, which has one of the highest cholera fatality rates in the country.
"The situation was absolute chaos. There were no beds and patients everywhere. People were dying of thirst because there was no water."
[snip]
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