Kwanzaa Silliness. This is the fifth day of the seven-day artificial black holiday "Kwanzaa", which runs from December 26th to January 1st. A week or so ago, I was in the post office to send a package and decided to get a booklet of stamps before I left. The (black) gentleman behind the counter asked 'Any particular kind?' I said no, being willing to take my chances, there being various commemoratives available for the holiday season. When I examined the stamps outside the post office, I discovered that he had given me Kwanzaa stamps! Since I am very white, especially in winter, I got quite a chuckle out of that, and wondered how my friends and relatives would react to a Christmas card with a Kwanzaa stamp.
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A week or so later, I got a Christmas card with a Kwanzaa stamp, from an Italian friend in Queens!
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Actually, there's no religious problem with a Kwanzaa stamp on a Christmas card:

[I]t is important to note Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday, not a religious one, thus available to and practiced by Africans of all religious faiths who come together based on the rich, ancient and varied common ground of their Africanness.

And I suppose one could argue that ancestrally we are all Africans, assuming the premise that humanity originated in East Africa is correct. And the stamp is colorful and cheery. But Kwanzaa is bull, a completely phony holiday rooted in ignorance and alienation.
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The official Kwanzaa website claims that:

Kwanzaa is an African American and Pan-African holiday which celebrates family, community and culture. Celebrated from 26 December thru 1 January, its origins are in the first harvest celebrations of Africa from which it takes its name. The name Kwanzaa is derived from the phrase "matunda ya kwanza" which means "first fruits" in Swahili, a Pan-African language which is the most widely spoken African language.

If the word in the phrase is "kwanza", why an extra-A? AA suggests a stressed sound of some sort, probably short-A as in "at". But the vowel of the last syllable of "Kwanzaa" is unstressed, a simple schwa, like the A in the same position in "America". We don't spell that "Americaa". So the invented spelling of this name of an invented holiday is foolish. That is not the only foolish thing about Kwanzaa.
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Aside from the sloppy etymology, there are several things wrong with the paragraph from the official Kwanzaa website quoted above. First, we in the United States, where Kwanzaa was created and its official organization is located, don't write dates "26 December". That is an affectation or mark of alienation. Date order in the United States is "December 26(th)".
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Second, there is no such thing as a "Pan-African" language — or much of anything else, for that matter. The closest thing we have to a "Pan-African" anything is the international organization now called (since "9.9.1999") the African Union ("AU", which was founded as the Organization of African Unity in 1963).
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The idea that Africa is a single racial or cultural entity is naive, romantic, and, alas, ultimately ignorant nonsense, an aspiration that some black Americans may hold high but which has little support in Africa itself. Moreover, despite complete freedom of movement, almost no black Americans have moved to Africa. They 'love' Africa at a distance. As one female black comic said years ago, "I've been to Africa. But I came right back."
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The romantic nonsense about "Mother Africa" reaches extremes that are at best laughable.



The red, black, and green flag of black unity (as above) is explained this way at the Kwanzaa Information Center on MelaNet:

The colors were established in 1920 as the banner of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) [Marcus Garvey's organization], and adopted as the symbol of Africans in America at the convention of the Negro People[ ]s of the World. It is a symbol of the devotion of all African people to the liberation of the African Continent, and the establishment of a Nation in Africa ruled by descendents of slaves from the Western World.

In addition, with the formation of the Republic of New[ ] Africa, it has become the symbol of devotion for African people in America to [a preposterous project to] establish an independent African nation on the North American Continent.

Thus, the colors were not chosen at any limited convention of Black persons; but, have been, in centuries past [Oh? Which centuries? By whom? Where?], and are now the emblem of true Black hope and pride, as embodied in all theories of Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism.

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.

I guess these people haven't heard: there are a whole bunch of black-ruled ministates in the West Indies (part of North America) — to which black Americans have also not moved in any significant number, and which have not united, politically or even economically, around their Africanness.
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Interestingly, the African Union's colors, incorporated into its flag, are green, gold, and white. There are also other proposed black-unity flags shown at the Flags of the World website.
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I also find it Interesting to note that the Anthem of the AU, which you can listen to at a link at the bottom of the "AU Symbols" page of the AU's website, is distinctly Western. No one would hear it as having any relation to Africa. (At least the AU has an anthem. The Organization of American States, which is much older, has none. But, then, the OAS does not aspire to continental union.)
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As for Swahili, it is not remotely "Pan-African" but is spoken in only a small part of the continent, embracing little more than 5 of Africa's 53 countries. A map of the area in which Swahili is spoken appears at Wikipedia's article on Swahili. That same approximate area is shown in the larger African context in a map at http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/l/c/lcc145/aboutme.htm.
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In no event was the Swahili-speaking area of Africa a significant source of people taken as slaves to the English colonies that became the United States, nor to the United States itself thereafter. (The importation of slaves was banned effective January 1, 1808, so there was only a 32-year window in which slaves were brought into the United States — or 27 years if one considers that the U.S. had effective independence no sooner than 1781.)
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A map of the sources of slaves for the United States appears at http://www.homestead.com/wysinger/mapofafricadiaspora.html.
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Notice that, as is explained in words at http://www.africanamericans.com/Origins.htm, no significant number of Africans from Swahili-speaking areas ever came as slaves to any part of what is now the United States. Ever.
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(Note: the designation "Central and Southeast Africa (Cameroon- N.Angola)" on the African Origins webpage should really be "... Southwest ...". But even if it were properly "Southeast", which it is not, it would still not include the Swahili Coast.)
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Essentially no one in the U.S. who descended from slaves has so much as a single ancestor who spoke Swahili. So why did a California-based African-American choose an East African language for a celebration of origins for black Americans whose ancestors all derived from West Africa?
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The phony identification with East Africa promoted by Kwanzaa disserves black Americans by misleading them about their real origins, mainly in West Africa (meaning the huge bulge into the Atlantic Ocean that starts at Cameroon) and the west coast of Central Africa. There is no one language spoken across the real original homeland of black Americans, but that is no reason to grab a language from East Africa to fill in. To suggest that Swahili has or should have some deep cultural and emotional meaning for black Americans is like suggesting to Irish-Americans that they should feel specially connected to Russian language and culture.
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Most of the slaves transported to (what became) the United States were brought by British slavers, in British ships, from areas the British colonized and from adjoining coastal countries. Today, the bulk of that area has English or French as a co-official national language. Indeed, if there is anything like a "Pan-African" language today, it is English, not Swahili. Many Africans feel as much ownership of (their version of) English as Americans do.
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The suggestion that Kwanzaa is a worldwide celebration for the entire African diaspora is puffery at best and pitiful nonsense at worst. There are about 850 million black people on Earth; at most 28 million people (the highest figure I found on the Internet) celebrate Kwanzaa. Even assuming that all those celebrants are black, that means that about 97% of the world's black people do not celebrate Kwanzaa. Nor should they.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,178.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:24 PM