Kwannzaa The Celebration of Family, Community and Culture

We're getting a little despondent with the commercialism of Christmas, Othella ® would like to share the festival of Kwanzaa with our followers.

 

Over the next few weeks we will sharing information on how to celebrate this festival and the seven principles  The festival has no religious concepts but is about The Celebration of Family, Community and Culture.  

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Kwanzaa is celebrated from 26th December through to the 1st January, its origins come form the  the first harvest celebrations of Africa from which it takes its name.

The name Kwanzaa is derived from the phrase "matunda ya kwanzaa" which means "first fruits" in Swahili.

 Kwanza was created in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, professor of Africana Studies at California State University, Long Beach, author and scholar-activist.

As far back as ancient Egypt and Nubia the first-fruits celebrations have been recorded these celebrations appear in ancient and modern times in other classical African civilizations such as Ashanti iland and Yoruba land. These celebrations are also found in ancient and modern times among societies as large as empires (the Zulu or kingdoms (Swaziland) or smaller societies and groups like the Matabele, Thonga and Lovedu, all of south eastern Africa. Kwanzaa builds on the five fundamental activities of Continental African "first fruit" celebrations: ingathering; reverence; commemoration; recommitment; and celebration


  Kwanzaa, is

• a time of ingathering of the people to reaffirm the bonds between them;
•  a time of special reverence for the creator and creation in thanks and respect for the blessings, bountifulness and beauty of creation;
•  a time for commemoration of the past in pursuit of its lessons and in honor of its models of human excellence, our ancestors;
• a time of recommitment to our highest cultural ideals in our ongoing effort to always bring forth the best of African cultural thought and practice; and
•  a time for celebration of the Good, the good of life and of existence itself, the good of family, community and culture, the good of the awesome and the ordinary, in a word the good of the divine, natural and social.

The very first Kwanzaa was created to reaffirm and restore our rootedness in African culture. It was an expression of recovery and reconstruction of African culture which was being conducted in the general context of the Black Liberation Movement of the '60's. Kwanzaa was created to serve as a regular communal celebration to reaffirm and reinforce the bonds between us as a people. It was designed to be an ingathering to strengthen community and reaffirm common identity, purpose and direction as a people and a world community. It was created to introduce and reinforce the Nguzo Saba (the Seven Principles.)

These seven communitarian African values are:

• Umoja (Unity)

• Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)

• Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)

• Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)

• Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity)

• Imani (Faith)

This stress on the Nguzo Saba was at the same time an emphasis on the importance of African communitarian values in general, which stress family, community and culture and speak to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense. Kwanzaa was conceived as a fundamental and important way to introduce and reinforce these values and cultivate appreciation for them.

Source:http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org