Kwanzaa is a secular holiday created in the United States by Dr. Maulana Karenga in order to promote pan-Africanism. To do this, Kwanzaa stresses certain Swahili-titled principles.
Swahili is a pidgin language combining several East African languages and Arabic. It was invented by Arab traders to communicate better with their East African customers (interestingly enough, the Arab slave trade was a key driver of the language's development). Today Swahili is spoken by people mostly in Kenya, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Mozambique.
However, most African-Americans are descendants of those who were brought over in the Euro-American-African slave trade. This slave trade targeted west Africans.
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| West Africans to the Americas and Europe. East Africans to the Muslim homeland. From Slave Voyages. |
Kwanzaa ignores this cross-continental divide in peoples' cultures. European regimes are rightly blamed for ignoring cultures when cutting apart African; yet this holiday does the same sin in principle. This would be like me trying to promote the impact Irish-Americans have had in the United States by making a holiday
using the Gagauz language.
The person who invented Kwanzaa was born Ronald McKinley Everett. Everett changed his name to "Maulana Karenga" which in Swahili means "Master Teacher Keeper of Tradition". Dr. Karenga is an outsider who rebelled against the current system (both in America in general and specifically African-American society) and created the Kwanzaa myth to oppose the current system and promote himself, much like members of the
American Indian Movement and those who support
Siouxification. These myths are harmful because they rob the rich diversity of the truth for an outsider who tries to use these myths for radical means.
