Kwanzaa, is an annual holiday affirming African family and social values that is celebrated primarily in the United States from Wednesday, December 26 to Saturday, January 1. Both the name and the celebration were devised in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, a professor of Africana studies at California State University in Long Beach and an important figure in Afrocentrism. Karenga borrowed the word kwanza, meaning “first,” from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, adding the seventh letter, an extra a, to make the word long enough to accommodate one letter for each of the seven children present at an early celebration. (The name Kwanzaa is not itself a Swahili word.)

Although Kwanzaa is primarily an African American holiday, it has also come to be celebrated outside the United States, particularly in Caribbean and other countries where there are large numbers of descendants of Africans. It was conceived as a nonpolitical and nonreligious holiday, and it is not considered to be a substitute for Christmas.

Each of the days of the celebration is dedicated to one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa:

• unity (umoja)
• self-determination (kujichagulia)
• collective responsibility (ujima)
• cooperative economics (ujamaa)
• purpose (nia)
• creativity (kuumba)
• faith (imani)

There also are seven symbols of the holiday:

• fruits, vegetables, and nuts
• a straw mat
• a candleholder
• ears of corn (maize)
• gifts
• a communal cup signifying unity
• seven candles in the African colours of red, green, and black, symbolizing the seven principles.

On each day the family comes together to light one of the candles in the kinara, or candleholder, and to discuss the principle for the day. On December 31, families join in a community feast called the karamu. Some participants wear traditional African clothing during the celebration.

Each year, with the onset of Christmas, we are treated to another gauzy, fluff piece about how great Kwanzaa is by yet another PC spewing columnist. This year, among many others, we find aggrandizement such as that on the Opra Daily website in an article titled “These Kwanzaa Traditions Celebrate the Power of Honoring Our Past” by Stephanie L. King (https://twitter.com/_stephanielking) and National Geographics article “Kwanzaa celebrates African-American heritage. Here’s how it came to be—and what it means today”. We even find such helpful sites as Teacher Planet’s, “Kwanzaa Resources for Teachers.” Yes, the world is filled with celebratory lionization of Kwanzaa.

Several years ago, the Houston Chronicle got in the act with a piece by Leslie Casimir titled “Learning about Kwanzaa from the holiday’s creator.” This one, though, was a bit off the usual track of the how-great-is-Kwanzaa theme because this particular piece celebrated the inventor of the faux holiday, Maulana Karenga, himself. So, instead of merely celebrating this manufactured holiday Casimir amazingly made a hero of the rapist, race monger and violent thug who created it! To Casimir, Kwanzaa creator “Maulana Karenga” was a hero.

But just like the manufactured holiday he invented out of whole cloth, this “Maulana Karenga” is also a false front created out of fluff and nonsense. As it happens this supposedly great man’s real name is not really “Maulana Karenga,” but is instead Ronald McKinley Everett, AKA Maulana Ron Karenga. We’ll soon see that subterfuge, reinvention and smoke-and-mirrors are “Karenga’s” stock in trade.

Casimir gave us her version of the history of this “holiday.” It has only a short history, at that.

“Created in 1966 by Karenga, a professor of black studies at California State University at Long Beach, Kwanzaa was born out of the black freedom movement of the 1960s, when the Watts riots rocked Los Angeles. It starts the day after Christmas and ends on the first day of the new year.“

I love how Casimir employed the euphemism “black freedom movement” for the group that Ronald McKinley Everett “Karenga” belonged to when he created Kwanzaa. In the 60s, “Karenga” was in an organization called US (as in “us” — blacks — against “them” — whites), a black power militant group that he founded, one that frequently clashed in violence with police and even other black power groups. Members of his group even killed two Black Panthers in 1969.

Sounds like they really cared about “freedom,” eh? And what a role model for the kiddies. Yes, kindly professor Maulana Karenga. What a great guy.

Casimir seemed not to understand why people would doubt this man, though.

“Still, many people don’t know much about Kwanzaa or the elusive Karenga, who shuns giving interviews to the mainstream press.”

Well, it’s not surprising that he doesn’t want to give too many interviews what with his disgusting record as a violent felon and sexual criminal and all. You see, Karenga has a long criminal record. A look at his real history finds that in 1971 Everett served time in jail for assault. By then Everett had changed his name to Maulana Ron Karenga and began to affect a pseudo African costume and act the part of a native African — even though he had been born in the USA.

It wasn’t mere assault Karenga was convicted of, either. It was the sexual assault and torture that he perpetrated against some of his own female followers. The L.A. Times then reported that he placed a hot soldering iron in one woman’s mouth and used a vise to crush another’s toe, of all things.

As writer Lynn Woolley wrote of Professor “Karenga”:

“And so this is Kwanzaa. The militant past of the creator is now ignored in favor of the so-called seven principles of Nguza Saba ” principles such as unity, family and self-determination that could have come from Bill Bennett’s “Book of Virtues.” The word “Kwanzaa” is Swahili, meaning something like “fresh fruits of harvest.”

“No one remembers the part about “re-Africanization” or the sevenfold path of blackness that Dr. Karenga once espoused. Hardly anyone remembers the shootings, the beatings, the tortures and the prison terms that were once the center of his life. It’s just not PC to bring that sort of stuff up now that Kwanzaa is commercialized and making big bucks.“

But, Casimir offers us Karenga’s prattle anyway, treating it as the advice of a sage:

“As part of the black freedom movement, we were using this to return to our history and culture,” Karenga said.

He spoke to a crowd of about 100 people ” young and old ” at the Third Ward community center, headed by Deloyd Parker, an avid promoter of Kwanzaa’s Afrocentric traditions and beliefs.

“We have to wake up that history, we have to remember ourselves in a more expansive way,” Karenga said. “To liberate ourselves as ghetto dwellers.”

In a day when the black middle class numbers in the millions and when more whites than blacks voted for a black man for president, for “Karenga” to claim that blacks are still relegated to the “ghettos” smacks of race baiting and trying to “keep hope alive” so that he can continue to cause hatred between whites and blacks.

Sadly each year the Old Media is all too happy to assist him in that “holiday” endeavor.

But maybe not everyone if fooled by the faux holiday created by a criminal? This year, for instance, Kalamazoo, Michigan decided to dispense with its public Kwanzaa celebration. In fact, few cities worry over much about this so-called holiday.

Even some African Americans are not fooled into accepting Kwanzaa. As Jenice Armstrong from Philadelphia wrote in 2010, the “truth is that Kwanzaa has never caught on with the majority of black Americans.”

Of course if it weren’t for an Old Media establishment that had given this Karenga’s criminality a wholesale whitewashing, this faux holiday could never have gained the little traction it got in the first place. Put it this way, imagine if famed Ku Klux Klan member David Duke had created a holiday. Do you think the Old Media would have happily sold his creation to a misinformed public without mentioning Duke’s personal history? Not a change, and rightfully so.