A very happy Kwanzaa to those of you beginning its celebration today, in its 40th-anniversary year.
While Kwanzaa’s founder, Dr. Maulana Karenga, intended Kwanzaa to be “an African holiday created for African peoples,” he also said that “Any particular message that is good for a particular people, if it is human in its content and ethical in its grounding, speaks not just to that people, it speaks to the world.” With that in mind, I want to share part of his annual Kwanzaa message (PDF link). It is a precept many of us, of African descent or not, may find compelling:
Let us move forward, then, confident in our right and responsibility to challenge and expand the social and moral imagination of society and the world. And let us keep the good faith of our forefathers and mothers, steadfastly devoted to justice, self-consciously open to sharing and profoundly committed to that ancient and ongoing ethical mandate to constantly strive and struggle to make good ever more present and powerful in the world.