Kwanzaa, 26 December - 01 January, is a 1984 manifestation of doublethink worthy of any Ministry of Truth or grasping social activist. Ron M. Everett, self-rechristened Swahili "maulana" (equivalent to Rabbi, of all things) Ron Karenga, wove the Kwanzaa tapestry out of whole cloth on 26 December 1966. He fancies himself a "cultural nationalist" (Marxist of convenience). From The Quotable Karenga (Clyde Halisi and James Mtume, eds., US Organization, Los Angeles: 1967)
"The sevenfold path of blackness is think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black."
One presumes accepting Welfare, doing drugs, fathering bastards, and rejecting mainstream education are in there somewhere. Blacks, after all, have a separate culture exemplified by Ebonics, Al Sharpton, Equal Opportunity and. above all, diversity (sanctioned theft of services).
In 1969 Ron Ndabezitha Everett-Karenga's US Organization squared off against the Black Panthers regarding who would bully the Afro-American Studies Center at UCLA. On 17 January, Black Panthers John Jerome Huggins and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter publicly intensely scolded the competition. They had been admitted to UCLA via a Federal program that forcibly inserted high-school dropouts into universities (Washington - improved means to deteriorated ends). Their higher education was completed after the meeting when they were shot dead by soul brothers George P. and Larry Joseph Stiner - enthusiastic adherents of Karenga's situational ethics practice of committing unspeakable acts upon Blacks who got in his way.
On 09 May 1970 Karenga commenced interrogation of two Black women that led to his conviction on two counts of felonious assault and one count of false imprisonment for the beating and torture of Deborah Jones and Gail Davis. He was sentenced to serve one to ten years in prison on 17 September 1971. Judge Arthur L. Alarcon quoted a psychiatrist's report,
"This man now presents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and delusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment."
Ronald McKinley Everett, born 14 July 1941, was the fourteenth child of a Baptist minister working a Parsonsburg, Maryland poultry farm. Echoes of his intellectually humble origin abound in his Kwanzaa fabrication. Agrarian societies do not celebrate harvest festivals after the Winter Solstice. As Karenga elucidated in a 1978 Washington Post interview,
"I put it around Christmas because I knew that's when a lot of bloods would be partying."
By 1979 Maulana Ron Karenga was released from prison and running the Black Studies Department at California State University in Long Beach. Cal State declines to list the qualifications that secured a convicted felon a public university professorship. Not just any felon convicted of beating and torture can be a university professor in California. California Education Code Section 44237 states extreme displeasure with a teacher's commission of and conviction for "violent" (subdivision (c) of Penal Code section 667.5) or "serious" (subdivision (c) of Penal Code section 1192.7) felonies. It appears that some Opportunities are more Liberally Equal than others.
New World Blacks imported by European wholesalers were procured from West African Arab merchants who in turn stocked their slave inventory from raids by the local Black African tribes upon their brethren. Swahili is spoken in Kenya and Tanzania, about 2700 miles to the southeast. The Slave Coast (Ghana, Togo, Benin; Nigeria with 500+ languages!) chats in Igbo, Hausa, Fulfulde, Akan, Kanuri, Ewe, Dagaare, Anaang, Ebira, Edo, Ibibio, Fon-Gbe, Senoufo, Izon, and Abron (more than one million speakers each). Swahili is barely a rumor on the Slave Coast.
The modern Karenga is an avowed Marxist with dialectical fabrications as convenient. The seven principles of Kwanzaa include "collective work" and "cooperative economics." Kwanzaa greeting cards alone are a capitalist engine of profit, seven figure annual sales, upon which Karenga receives no royalties whatsoever. The defining benchmark of the USSR was that not even its Socialist crooks became wealthy.
Karenga's National Association of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO) hucksters "a communitarian African philosophy which is an ongoing synthesis of the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world." This is faery dust. There is no unified African anything, even in residence upon the Dark Continent: Arabs who despise Black Africans in the north; Sub-Saharan Black Africans; and millions of White folk who created productivity and affluence in South Africa since 1652 and then got raped and pillaged by Nelson Mandela's mob. Karenga maintains
"Social revolutionary change for Black America can be achieved by the act of revealing and disclosing individuals to their cultural African heritage."
Microcrap-certified information systems engineers, credentials obtained after some six months of study, start around $75K/annum and have their pick of jobs. Circuit boards and software do not detect race, color, creed, national origin... whether your momma is hooking on Harbor Avenue, if your dad wears a yarmulke, or if you have not bathed in three months. If that is not social revolutionary change, I don't know what is. Kwanzaa that, Mr. Everett.