Since the 1960s, a countless number of families and communities across the USA have continued to present Kwanzaa as a vehicle to collectively invigorate and strengthen our African identity and cultural interconnections.

How do African Americans express their heritage in a multi-cultural world? Since the 1960s, a countless number of families and communities across the USA have continued to present Kwanzaa as a vehicle to collectively invigorate and strengthen our African identity and cultural interconnections. Kwanzaa, celebrated from December 26th to January 1st, provides a designated time to widely celebrate our ancestral origin and to share the riveting beauty of African culture, its values, insights, and instructive practices so we can deeply rejuvenate our lives, families, and community for mutual flourishing and benefit.

The annual tradition functions to rejuvenate our cultural memory around the necessity, urgency, and priority of continuing, maintaining, and expanding our collective uplift Movement, so we can propel the momentum of our actions and deeds forward in an organized manner. The Kwanzaa season provides a designated time for people of African descent to coalesce and express their ethnicity together, in the collective richness and festive cultural ambiance of enriching African art, dance, poetry, folktales, music, cuisine, literature, and in the beauty of heritage clothing, heirlooms, hairstyles, jewelry, crafts, and expansive creative productions.

The Kwanzaa cultural tradition was created and framed by Dr. Maulana Karenga in Los Angeles, California within the midst and context of the 1960's African American Freedom Movement. And as the creator of Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Karenga is the author of the definitive text on its origins, principles, practices, symbols, and meaning. Take time to learn and relearn more information about Kwanzaa and then share and apply the beauty of its values, insights, and instructive practices throughout our community. This cultural tradition's authoritative source publication is readily available at – http://www.sankorepress.com and a comprehensive reading, will provide considerable detailed and in-depth explanations on the overarching context.

The name Kwanzaa comes from the Kiswahili phrase, matunda ya kwanza, where matunda means "fruits", and ya kwanza means "first". Dr. Karenga added the extra "a" to the Kiswahili word kwanza, to distinguish the cultural tradition's name. The language of Kiswahili was chosen for the name Kwanzaa and all accompanying phrases, because it is the most widely spoken African continental trade language used among African countries. And the year-end observance of Kwanzaa occurs because this cultural expression is derived from the African continent's traditional year-end agricultural harvest celebrations.

Kwanzaa has spread all around the world as an African affirming cultural celebration. The cultural expression is now evident throughout North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean Islands, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and its worldwide reach encompasses over 60 million people of African descent. This beautiful cultural model of possibility and cultural excellence created by Dr. Maulana Karenga, reminds our communities that we have the capacity, duty, and wherewithal to change the prevailing conditions of our lives with cultural memory, if we diligently practice cultural values, focused priorities, organization, commitment, and continuous empowered action.

Kwanzaa serves to restore and reinforce rootedness in our African heritage, culture, and consciousness, as well as functions to strengthen, maintain, and reaffirm our interconnected family, community, and cultural bonds. The cultural expression brings us together from various countries, classes, ages, generations, religious traditions, and political persuasions to focus on and recommit to develop, contribute to, maintain, continue, manifest, uplift, preserve, expand, and propel forward much more cultural memory, Movement, and momentum for our future generations. Kwanzaa honors the moral responsibility and awesome obligation to remember our esteemed Ancestors, who through their love, labor, and struggle, laid the foundation for us and pushed our lives and history forward, and on whose collective shoulders we now stand.

Kwanzaa celebrates traditions that youth can participate in and pass on

he thrust of the cultural celebration is to continually strive to build, strengthen, maintain, and reaffirm our family, community, and cultural bonds with deliberate actions that expand more excellence, clarity, trust, confidence, togetherness, dignity, support, caring, cooperation, empowerment, productivity, progress, and wellbeing. And the annual tradition reminds our community in its historical, geographical, and current diversity to continue to embrace, embody, build on, contribute to, maintain, manifest, and expand a dignified cultural legacy as a collective way of functioning in the world. Our overall condition will change when enough individuals and families embrace, nurture, support, teach, maintain, and institutionalize self-knowledge to transform their self-image, as well as persistently work to intentionally practice more overarching culturally grounded values.