One year, people around my age woke up and discovered that the “holiday season” of Christmas and New Year’s Dah became a trio, with the addition of something called Kwanzaa. Oh sure, there were rumblings of a new holiday. This new “holiday” raises the question, why is a day invented in 1966 by a rapist who ran a Black separatist group considered by some as a holiday on par with Christmas or New Year’s
Kwanza begins the day after Christmas, December 26, and ends on January 1. Part of the tradition of the first was observed by many Americans is drinking the traditional “hair” of the dog” to “void a hangover from the previous evening’s New Year’s Celebration.
Some claim that Kwanzaa is a holiday observed all over the world. However, that is a lie. Kwanzaa is a day celebrated exclusively in the U.S.! It’s not celebrated in other parts of the world (including Africa). The name Kwanzaa comes from a phrase” of Swahili origin,” “Matunda Ya Kwanza,” and translates as “translates as “First Fruits of the Harvest.”
That’s right, it’s supposed to be spelled with only one “a.” This means that the very name of this supposed holiday is a typo.
Kwanzaa is supposed to be a week-long holiday honoring African culture and traditions, but it is tainted by its founder and original purpose.
The man who created the holiday, Maulana Karenga (born Ronald McKinley Everett), described the “celebration as “An All-Seasons Celebration and Practice of the Good.” The problem with that statement is that Maulana Karenga is anything but good. He was convicted in 1971 of torturing two women who were members of his organization, U.S. (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded.
A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times related the testimony of the woman regarding her torture:
“Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.”
Nice Guy? Makes one wonder why some Black women celebrate this fraud and why women of any race would report about and/or recognize this “holiday.”
Mr.Karanga was convinced that the women were trying to poison him. He and three members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some of the “nonexistent “crystals” of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.
I am not a doctor, nor have I ever played one on television, but this Karenga guy sounds like a paranoid psycho. At the very least, the dude “has mental “issues.”
Somehow, I cannot see rational people wanting to observe a holiday created by such a sick, violent man\ why would anybody want to celebrate a holiday invented by a man who tortured women?
Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because the mainstream media rarely mentions this part of the Kwanzaa story.
When he invented the holiday, Karenga aimed to “give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of t “the dominant society.”
Why would an African American of Christian faith want to dissociate from their faith on Christmas or a Jew of color want to ignore the joy of a family lighting their Chanukah (Menorah), singing songs, and eating jelly donuts?
Most people of color I know practice one of the Abrahamic faiths. They observe the festivals of their religion, which generally try to unite all the people of the world, no matter their race or faith.
This woke holiday, raised by some to the level of Christmas, has a purpose totally antithetical to Christmas. Christmas is meant to unify, and Kwanzaa is meant to divide and isolate Black Americans from the rest of Americans of color who practice the same faith. I didn’t know” that de-whitewashes a word. It wasn’t a spelling word when I was in elementary school.
Shouldn’t preachers and the news media rebuke Kwanzaa? Shouldn’t they trash the holiday because it teaches the opposite of messages such as “Peace on Earth” or “Goodwill toward man?” None of my Christian friends ever told me that Jesus’ message was “blacks only.”
And as a student of Jewish history, I can verify the fact ancient Judeans weren’t saying Blacks only. Heck, Moses, the greatest prophet of all time, was married to a Black woman, and when God dictated the Torah to Moses, there was nothing about Blacks only. Trust me, you don’t skip anything when the big guy upstairs tells you what to write. Therefore, no commandment to Jews says blacks only.
If Jews were supposed to be prejudiced against blacks, why would the end of the Five Books Of Moses praise the prophet who married a black woman?” It wouldn’t say (Spoiler Alert), “Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses—whom God singled out, face to face. (H/T God).
Eventually, the creator of the Kwanzaa scam, Maulana Karenga, admitted it was a fraud. Maulana Karenga admitted it was a fraud. In 1978, he told the Washington Post:
“I created Kwanzaa,” laughed Ron Karenga like a teenager who’s just divulged a deeply held, precious secret. “People think it’s African. But it’s not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods (blacks) would be partying!”
In 1999, the late Tony Snow laid out what was so wrong with the holiday:
There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have 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.
Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.
To put that in perspective, 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 gaffe.
Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.
Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.
The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.
(…) Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.
So what is Kwanzaa? It’s the ultimate fraud. It is a holiday created by a man responsible for violently torturing two women. It aims to separate the races, antithetical to the message of other holidays observed by people of all races. If African Americans would like to come up with a holiday that celebrates the rich Western African culture many lost when they were dragged from their homeland to become slaves in North America, I would not object—heck, I would probably help celebrate.
But it is hard to understand why anybody would want to follow the lead of a violent felon by celebrating a made-up holiday that mistakes racism and segregation for spirituality and fiction.