Kwanzaa's Radical Roots in the Black Power Movement

Performers with the African Heritage Dancers and Drummers hold a Kwanzaa celebration at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C., Dec. 27, 2017 [AFP/Saul Loeb]

After the bustle of the Christmas season but before New Year’s festivities, celebrants of Kwanzaa greet one another with “Habari Gani?” meaning, “What’s the news?” in Swahili.

The holiday is an American invention, a fact that still seems to confuse plenty of people. Last year, President Donald Trump sent season’s greetings to those observing Kwanzaa “around the world.” While Kwanzaa’s popularity has declined since its founding in 1966 (it’s hard to say how many people celebrate it, but estimates are low), its principles have continued to resonate in an era of inequality and uprisings against police brutality.

Following the Watts riots and the assassination of Malcolm X, Maulana Karenga, a Black nationalist leader and founder of the Us Organization, a rival group to the Black Panther Party, created Kwanzaa to celebrate African American culture and connect Black Americans to their African ancestry through Black nationalist tradition. From Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, each of the seven days celebrates a principle: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. Seven candles with the Pan-African colors of red, green and black are lit throughout the week. They rest in a candleholder on a traditional placemat with a display of fruits and vegetables and a “unity cup” alongside African books and art.

The celebration’s message about communal empowerment continues to resonate today. Take the Kwanzaa Crawl, an annual bar crawl for Black-owned businesses in Brooklyn and Harlem that started in 2016, promoting cooperative economics and Black enterprise. Far from the over-the-top commercialization of Kwanzaa that corporations drove in the early 2000s (“Chrismahanukwanzakah,” anyone?), the event brought in $250,000 in 2019 for Black business owners living through the gentrification of their historically Black neighborhoods.

Kwanzaa, however, isn’t without controversy. The holiday’s founder, Karenga, was incarcerated in the ‘70s on charges of assault and false imprisonment of two women. And as The Root’s Felice León reported in an interview with scholar Keith A. Mayes, large swathes of Black nationalism promoted traditional ideas about women’s roles and were misogynistic toward Black women activists.

But as Chanté Griffin writes, “While Karenga violated the collective by bombastically exalting himself, Kwanzaa still centers the collective. Kwanzaa still uplifts, still unites, still celebrates, still gives us the space to imagine ourselves and our communities anew.”