pera play Yes, Kwanzaa Is Made Up. That’s Why It’s Great
This article was originally published on Dec. 19, 2023.
Forget April: In middle school, November was always, inevitably, the cruelest month for me. Starting around Thanksgiving, my friends would gather in the locker room after gym class to consult one another on the best strategies for the holiday season. Crouched over Best Buy and Circuit City catalogs, they would argue the merits of the PlayStation 2 versus the Xbox. Should they beg for the latest edition of NBA 2K, a game that would be obsolete within nine months? Or Halo?
I envied them. For me, there would be no gifts — at least, no gifts that I actually wanted. My mom, a child of both the 1970s and Southern Californian fluidity, had converted to Islam and stopped celebrating Christmas years prior — not because of her new faith but because she was fed up with that holiday’s materialism. She regarded Christmas with the same suspicion she felt toward other mainstream American holidays. We didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving either, or Halloween; I suspect the only reason we observed Valentine’s Day was that my mom liked to receive flowers every now and again. As I understood it, we scorned these days because they asked us to subscribe to “white” cultural stories about how the world worked, and we didn’t want any part of that. Why would we? We had our own holiday: Kwanzaa.
Even by the standards of America, a country that birthed a whole new branch of Christianity in the last 200 years, Kwanzaa is a baby. Founded in 1966 by a Southern Californian Black Power activist named Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa was meant to be the bedrock of a new cultural nationalism that appealed to Black people increasingly disillusioned by the post-Civil Rights Movement world. At a time when Black people were finding ways to express their independence from white cultural norms — trading “slave names” for African (or maybe just African-inspired) ones, growing their hair out, donning Ghanaian kente cloth — Kwanzaa was an attempt to craft a distinctly Black consciousness by providing an alternative to a “white” Christmas.
Rooted in sometimes artful but often ham-handed borrowing of various African traditions, the holiday is one of the many bridges Black Americans tried to build between themselves and the African homeland of their imagination. Kwanzaa unfolds across seven nights, each of them dedicated to one of seven principles, among them unity, self-determination and collective work. In some cases, children are given gifts on each night, with one catch: The gifts have to be educational in nature. On the sixth day, the holiday culminates in a celebratory feast.
My mom loved this. Every year, she would unpack the kente cloth; the kinara (a seven-pronged candelabra similar to a menorah); red, black and green candles; the plastic fruit and cornucopia that represented the imagined bounty of the homeland. Every night, my younger brother, my parents and I would gather before the kinara to light a candle while reciting the holiday’s principles. On the sixth day, my father would smoke meat in our backyard while my mom cooked something akin to a Thanksgiving dinner.
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