ABSTRACT
The theme of invention will sit front and center in this chapter. Invention informs and captures the process of Kwanzaa’s “making,” and Maulana Karenga-the holiday’s founder’s “remaking.” Kwanzaa’s making at the level of holiday and Karenga’s re-making at the level of the individual speaks profoundly to a transformation in civil rights politics and new thinking about the continent of Africa. African continental politics manifested in the 1950s and1960s. Africa’s rise was real-independence struggles that informed the American Civil Rights and Black Power Movements —as well as metaphorical and imagined-the creation of new holiday rituals like Kwanzaa. For black Americans, the rise of Africa meant a veritable cultural return to continental roots and codifying this return in a form of a US-based black cultural nationalism that focused on black cultural liberation. But black cultural nationalism did not import an “original” Africa; it imagined one after an existential crisis with Christmas in December 1965 and two centuries of white holiday representations. Chapter 2 will examine this imagined return by looking at the dilemma Christmas posed, and the multiple discourses that Karenga used to create Kwanzaa. The chapter will closely examine Kwanzaa’s constituent parts: borrowed syncretic African agricultural rituals from different parts of the continent. This chapter will not only introduce the man and the organization that created Kwanzaa, but ask what kind of Africa they offered black Americans. After mapping Kwanzaa and its ceremonial procedures, I will deconstruct and separate the holiday’s African and black American
components and demonstrate how Kwanzaa fit into a larger pattern of US-based black nationalist performance. The Black Power Movement enshrined black nationalist performance in the form of Afros, raised fists, and African dashikis. To partake in Kwanzaa during the last week of December was to perform Africa by speaking and greeting in Swahili, lighting candles, pouring libations, calling on the name of the ancestors, as well as feasting. More than remembering an African past, Kwanzaa insisted that African-Americans maintain a deep visceral connection with the continent and its “history”—one that involved visible activity even outside of the official Kwanzaa period.
