Category: Culture

Kuumba

“Take what you do best and do it for your people.”
-Dr. John Henrik Clarke

The best of ourselves should always be used to uplift our people. The sixth day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of Kuumba (Creativity), which encourages us “To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.” This principle reminds us of the importance of using our talents, skills, and intellect to improve the condition of our community, recognizing, as the Ewe proverb says, that “Your goodness is not for yourself but for others.”

Nia

“When a people lose the knowledge of who they are, that is, their culture, they lose the very foundation upon which their individual existence and their society is based. To combat this loss, each African person must be equipped with a ‘Grand Vision of the Future,’ a vision extending beyond personal interests such that this vision becomes the embodiment of the vital interest and moral centerhod of the entire African World Community. I refer to this vision as The African Principle.”
-Dr. Anderson Thompson

In our ancestral paradigms, the purpose of life was inextricably linked to the collective good. The fifth day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of Nia (Purpose), which encourages us “To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.” This principle reminds us that in African traditions, the purpose of human existence is to to contribute to the betterment of one’s community. It also encourages us to study the past and to use it as a standard for excellence.

Ujamaa

“The philosophy of black nationalism involves a re-education program in the black community in regards to economics. Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don’t live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer.”
-Malcolm X

An economic system provides for the material needs of a community. The fourth day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), which encourages us “To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.” This principle compels us to seek to control the economies of our communities and societies. Economic dependency is a basis of enslavement. True sovereignty requires that we provide for our own needs to ensure a prosperous future.

Ujima

Akpata na abọ di mma nkụkọta.
“It is good to join two brooms together when sweeping.”
-Igbo proverb

Cooperation is the lifeblood of community. The third day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of Ujima (Collective work and responsibility), which encourages us “To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together.” This principle teaches us that our obligations are not limited to ourselves, but that they extend to our community as a whole and our collective well-being.

Kujichagulia

“A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation.”
-Malcolm X

A sovereign people defines its own reality. The second principle of Kwanzaa, Kujichagulia (self-determination), expresses “To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.” This pinciple necessarily teaches the interrelatedness of self-reliance to self-determination. To determine our own future, we must also be secure within ourselves. This means that we must feed, cloth, house, heal, educate, and defend ourselves. Without these, we are dependent on others and cannot be truly self-determining.

Umoja

Mbooloo mooy doole.
“There is power in a group.”
-Wolof proverb

Unity of purpose is critical for our success as a people. The first principle of Kwanzaa, Umoja (unity), expresses “To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.” Unity is the basis of any collective success, and enables us to effective practice self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, or to have faith in ourselves and our capabilities.

Inoculation against mis-orientation

At the heart of the problem is our fractured sense of cultural identity. Many of us see ourselves as Black, unmoored from any kind of ancestral foundation.

Afro-Brazilians emphasize their ancestral inheritance from the Kongo, Yorùbá, and to a lesser extent Gbe-speaking peoples. Haitians note their connection to Kongo and, again, Gbe-speaking peoples. Even in this country, there were times where our connections to Kongo, Igbo, and Mande-speaking peoples were quite salient.

I think that such a sense of ancestral identity is quite valuable as a means of anchoring oneself. It enables us to see ourselves as (A) Africans/Blacks in the US, (B) whose culture and traditions rests upon the foundation of many African ethnicities, (C) which are themselves emergent from a continuum of African historicity stretching back millennia. Such a grounding should be sufficient to inoculate us against the kind of cultural and historical mis-orientaiton which is ever-fashionable amongst some of us.

Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert

Finding Our Way Through the Desert: Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview offers a critical examination of the ideas and work of Carruthers, a key architect of the African-centered paradigm and a major contributor to its application to the study of Nile Valley culture and civilization. Herein, Kamau Rashid explicates some of Carruthers’s principal contributions, the theoretical and practical implications of his work, and how Carruthers’s work is situated in the stream of Black intellectual genealogy. Essential to this book are Carruthers’s concerns about the vital importance of Black intellectuals in the illumination of new visions of future possibility for African people. The centrality of African history and culture as resources in the transformation of consciousness and ultimately the revitalization of an African worldview were key elements in Carruthers’s conceptualization of two interrelated imperatives—the re-Africanization of Black consciousness and the transformation of reality. Composed of three parts, this book discusses various themes including Black education, disciplinary knowledge and knowledge construction, indigenous African cosmologies, African deep thought, institutional formation, revolutionary struggle, history and historiography to explore the implications of Carruthers’s thinking to the ongoing malaise of African people globally.

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Capoeira to Cultivate the Body, Mind, and Spirit

I taught Capoeira this morning. I gave each student a homework assignment based on things that they did during class. The homework assignments related to movement skills, coordination, or motor control.

I maintain that many of the things that we do within Capoeira actually impacts our lives outside of Capoeira. That is, the comportment (i.e., the embodiment) of the Capoeirista occasions changes in how our minds and bodies relate to movement. Capoeira teaches proprioception (i.e., bodily awareness) laying a basis for improving our coordination and control. The skills that Capoeira teaches are transferable to things both mental and physical. The assignments that I gave, while on the surface pertain to the use of the body, also, necessarily relate to the cultivation of the mind and spirit. I feel that such holistic cultivation is a uniquely powerful aspect of this art.