Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
by William J. Bennetta
ʺAnywhere we are, Us is.ʺ
That looks like a line from an Amos ʹN Andy show. One can easily
imagine that it served as the motto of the Mystic Knights of the Sea,
and that it was recited by such characters as The Kingfish, Andy
Brown and Algonquin J. Calhoun.
In fact, however, the line that I have quoted is the motto of a real
organization ‐‐ a real organization that was originally named United
Slaves but now calls itself The Organization Us (or simply Us or US).
It was created some 40 years ago, in Southern California, by a black
racist who had begun life as Ron N. Everett but later had assumed the
name Maulana Karenga.
Karenga ‐‐ known chiefly as the inventor of Kwanzaa, a fake ʺAfricanʺ
holiday that he contrived in 1966 ‐‐ has enjoyed a truly colorful career.
He was a prominent black nationalist during the 1960s, when his
organization was involved in various violent operations. He was sent
to prison in 1971, after he and some of his pals tortured two women
with a soldering iron and a vise, among other things. He emerged
from prison in 1974, and a few years later ‐‐ in a maneuver that even
The Kingfish might have found difficult ‐‐ he got himself installed as
the chairman of the Department of Black Studies at California State
University at Long Beach. CSULB wasnʹt the only American
university that got the racial willies during the 1970s and set up a tin‐
pot black‐studies department, but CSULB (as far as I know) was the
only one that hired a chairman who was a violent felon.
Karenga is still working at CSULB and is still running The
Organization Us, and he and Us are still promoting his proprietary
holiday, Kwanzaa. Prentice Hall is promoting it too, so The American
Nation displays a picture of ʺan American familyʹs celebration of
Kwanzaaʺ ‐‐ but The American Nation doesnʹt tell anything about
Karenga, about his rules for carrying out a ʺcelebration of Kwanzaa,ʺ
or about his make‐believe Africanism. Let me supply some of the
information that Prentice Hall has hidden:
Kwanzaa is supposed to be celebrated from 26 December through 1
January: It competes with Christmas and Chanukah while
incorporating some echoes of both, e.g., gift‐giving and a ceremony
built around a seven‐holed candle‐holder that recalls Judaismʹs seven‐
branched menorah.
Karenga has concocted some bits of lore, lingo, and mumbo‐jumbo
that are intended to make Kwanzaa look like something out of Africa
instead of something from Los Angeles County, but his efforts have
been feeble. If you scan The Official Kwanzaa Web Site [see note 1,
below], youʹll read that the origins of Kwanzaa lie in ʺthe first harvest
celebrations of Africa,ʺ which allegedly ʺare recorded in African
history as far back as ancient Egypt and Nubiaʺ ‐‐ but there is no
explanation of why any ancient Egyptians or Nubians might have
held harvest festivals around the time of the winter solstice, and there
is no identification of the crops that they harvested. Karengaʹs formula
for celebrating Kwanzaa requires the use of two ears of maize ‐‐ but
maize is a New World plant, and it wasnʹt known at all in ancient
Africa.
True believers can purchase ears of maize and other Kwanzaa
equipment (e.g., candles and seven‐holed candle‐holders and straw
mats) from the University of Sankore Press, a company in Los
Angeles. This outfit evidently is controlled by Us and serves as Usʹs
marketing unit. It isnʹt a university press, and its name is a mockery.
The so‐called University of Sankore was an aggregation of Islamic
schools that flourished at Timbuktu in the 14th, 15th and 16th
centuries. No University of Sankore exists today.
In Karengaʹs Kwanzaa‐lingo, ears of maize are called by the Swahili
name ʺmuhindi.ʺ In fact, all the objects that Karenga has worked into
Kwanzaa have names taken from Swahili, which The Official
Kwanzaa Web site describes as ʺa Pan‐African languageʺ and ʺthe
most widely spoken African language.ʺ The labeling of Swahili as a
ʺPan‐Africanʺ language is rubbish. Swahili ‐‐ a Bantu tongue that
includes many words absorbed from Arabic, from Persian and from
certain Indian languages ‐‐ is spoken by some 50 million people (i.e.,
about 7% of Africaʹs population). Most of those Swahili‐speakers are
concentrated in eastern Africa, in a region that includes Uganda,
Kenya, Tanzania and a strip of Zaire. The language which is used
most widely in Africa is Arabic; and indeed, Swahili was originally
written in Arabic script [note 2].
Kwanzaa is a hoax ‐ a hoax built around fake history and
pseudohistorical delusions. By attempting to dignify and promote
Kwanzaa in The American Nation, Prentice Hall has joined in a flim‐
flam.