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African-American History
African Culture and the Ongoing Quest for Excellence
Dialog, Principles, Practice
by Maulana Karenga, Ph.D.
The nearing of the next millennium unavoidably evokes concerns
and calls for a critical assessment of where we are and to what
tasks we should direct our attention and efforts in our ongoing
quest for a free and empowered community, a just and good society
and a better world. In our assessment we are of necessity directed
toward the continuing struggle to free ourselves both socially
and culturally. In fact, the two struggles are unbreakably linked.
For to free ourselves socially, we must build a consciousness,
cohesion and sense of specialness in community only culture can
give. But to bring forth the best of our culture, we must struggle
to clear social space for its recovery, reception and development.
It is in this context that our organization Us (Us, African people)
argued in the Sixties and continues to argue that the key challenge
in Black life is the cultural challenge. And this challenge is
essential to break beyond the boundaries of the culture of the
established order, recover, discover and bring forth the best
of our own culture, and effectively address the fundamental questions
of our world and our times.
The task, as Us perceived it then and contends now, is to forge
and embrace a culture that both prepares the people for the struggle
and sustains them in the process of the struggle for a world of
human freedom and human flourishing. This meant then and continues
to mean selecting and stressing elements of Black culture that
represent the best of African and human values, values which protect
and promote human life, human freedom and maximum human development.
It means also recreating liberation-supportive values, views and
practices which were lost, damaged or transformed in the midst
of oppression and creating new ways of seeing and approaching
the world that reinforce and raise up the people, support and
sustain the struggle, and point toward the new world we struggle
to bring into being.
Key to this process of cultural construction and reconstruction
is the ongoing dialog with African culture. Kawaida, the philosophy
of Us organization, defines this dialog as the constant practice
of asking questions and seeking answers from African culture to
the fundamental and enduring concerns of the African and human
community. At the heart of this project is the continuing quest
to free ourselves, live full and meaningful lives and become the
best of what it means to be both African and human in the fullest
sense of the words. Moreover, it involves an ongoing search for
models of excellence and possibilities within our culture by which
we speak our own special cultural truth to the world and make
our own unique contribution to the forward flow of human history.
To truly dialog with African culture means, first of all, using
it as a resource rather than as a mere reference. This is the
meaning of posing questions and seeking answers within African
culture concerning central issues of life and the world. To simply
use African culture as a reference is to name things considered
important, but never to use it to answer questions, solve problems,
or extract and shape paradigms of excellence and possibility in
thought and practice. To dialog with African culture, then, is
to constantly engage its texts, i.e., its oral, written, and living-practice
texts, its paradigms, its worldview and values, its understanding
of itself and the world, in an ongoing search for ever better
answers to the fundamental questions and challenges of our time.
We must always recognize and respect the fact that our culture
comes with its own special way of being human in the world and
that this particular African way of being human in the world provides
a pathway to the universal. For it represents African peoples'
way of engaging the fundamental concerns of humankind. Furthermore,
our culture has evolved in the longest of histories and thus has
amassed a rich and varied array of ancient and modern knowledge,
understanding, and wisdom concerning the world. Ours is a history
of struggle, creativity, achievement, and constant concern for
the right, the just, and the good. It is a history of ancient
wonder and achievement in the Nile Valley, awesome tragedy and
destruction in the Holocaust of Enslavement, and impressive triumph
in our constant struggle against overwhelming societal odds against
us in modern times. And ours is a history of an ongoing commitment
to raise up the good even in the midst of the most horrific evil
and to pursue the possible in spite of the catechism of impossibilities
repeatedly offered us.
Seven Core Areas Of Culture
It is within the context of this rich and most ancient of histories
and cultures that we must constantly search for and bring forth
the best of what it means to be African and pose new paradigms
of human excellence and possibility. This ongoing search for solutions
and models of human excellence and possibilities must occur, Kawaida
contends, in every area of human life but especially in the seven
core areas of culture: history; religion (spirituality and ethics);
social organization; economic organization; political organization;
creative production (art, music, literature, dance, etc.) and
ethos, the collective self-consciousness achieved as a result
of activity in the other six areas.
History
In the area of history, Us maintains, we must study history to
learn its lessons, absorb its spirit of possibility, extract and
emulate its models of excellence and possibility and honor the
moral obligation to remember. We must measure ourselves in the
mirror of the best of our history and constantly ask ourselves
how can we use the past as a foundation to inform, expand and
enrich our present and future. We must always be conscious of
our identity as the fathers and mothers of humanity and human
civilization in the Nile Valley, the sons and daughters of the
Holocaust of Enslavement and the authors and heirs of the Reaffirmation
of our Africanness and social justice tradition in the Sixties.
Surely this is a challenge for intellectual, social and moral
excellence, active opposition to all forms of enslavement, and
an enduring commitment to cultural rootedness, justice, and good
in the world.
Religion (Spirituality and Ethics)
In the area of religion (spirituality and ethics), our culture
has the most ancient of ethical traditions, the oldest ethical,
spiritual and social justice texts. We introduced the concept
of human dignity and the divine image of the human person as early
as 2140 BCE (before the common era) in the Sacred Husia, in the
Book of Kheti. We are the ones who spoke to the world in the earliest
of times saying, "speak truth, do justice, care for the vulnerable,
give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the
naked and a boat to those without one, care for the ill, be a
staff of support for those of old age, a father to the orphan,
a mother to the timid, a raft for the drowning and a ladder for
those trapped in the pit of despair, honor the elders and ancestors,
cherish and challenge the children, maintain a right relation
with the environment and always raise up the good and pursue the
possible." This is a tradition we must neither ignore nor
abandon.
Social Organization
Our social organization must be constantly concerned with values
and practice that affirm and strengthen family, community, and
culture. Certainly, the Nguzo Saba, the Seven Principles of Kawaida,
which undergird Kwanzaa, independent schools and rights of passage,
family maintenance, school retention and numerous other community
development and action programs are key to this. They are: Umoja
(Unity); Kujichagulia (Self-Determination); Ujima (Collective
Work and Responsibility); Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics); Nia
(Purpose); Kuumba (Creativity); and Imani (Faith). It is within
this framework of communitarian values that we build a peaceful
and harmonious togetherness; respect our special way of being
human in the world; build together in responsibility the relationships,
family, community, society and world we want to live in; share
work and wealth; accept the collective vocation of struggle for
freedom, justice, peace and human flourishing in the world; constantly
repair and restore the world, making it ever more beautiful and
beneficial and maintain our faith in the right and the good by
working and struggling to define, defend, and develop them in
the world.
Economic Organization
In the area of economics, our culture teaches us the principle
of Ujamaa which in its most expansive sense means shared work
and wealth rooted in a profound sense of kinship with other humans
and the environment. It teaches us to be constantly concerned
in our economic practice with the dignity of the human person,
with the well-being of family and community, the integrity of
the environment, and especially with the vulnerable among us:
the poor, the ill, the aged, the captive, the disabled, the refugee
and the stranger. For ours is a consciousness born not only of
ancient ethical teaching but also of the historical experience
of the vulnerability of the "motherless child, a long ways
from home" as expressed in our sacred songs.
Political Organization
Our culture teaches us to view politics as a collective vocation
to create a just and good society and advance human good in the
world. It calls us to honor our most ancient social justice tradition
that, as I noted in the Million Man March/Day of Absence Mission
Statement, "requires respect for the dignity and rights of
the human person, economic justice, meaningful political participation,
shared power, cultural integrity, mutual respect for all peoples,
and an uncompromising resistance to social forces and structures
which deny or limit these."
Creative Production
The best of African culture insists that our creative production
or art not only be technically sound but also socially purposeful
and responsible. It is at its best functional, collective and
committing. To be functional is to self-consciously have and urge
social purpose, to inform, instruct and inspire the people and
be an aesthetic translation of our will and struggle for liberation
and ever higher levels of life. It also means searching for and
creating new forms and styles to speak our truth and possibilities.
To be collective, Black art must be done for all, drawn and synthesized
from all, and rooted in a life-based language and imagery rich
in everyday relevance. It must be understandable without being
vulgarly simplistic, i.e., so pedestrian and impoverished that
it damages art as a discipline and the social message it attempts
to advance. And it must celebrate not only the transcendent and
awesome but also the ordinary, teaching the beauty and sacredness
of everyday people and their struggles to live full, decent, and
meaningful lives.
Finally, Black art must be committing, i.e., not simply inform
and inspire Blacks, but also commit them to the historical project
of liberation and a higher level of human life. To do this, it
must demand and urge willing and conscious involvement in struggle
and building of a new world and new men, women and children to
inhabit it. And it must move beyond protest and teach possibilities,
beyond victimization and teach Blacks to dare victory. The best
of the Black aesthetic teaches that art, then, must commit us
to what we can become and are becoming and inspire us to dare
the positive in a world often defined and deformed by the negative.
Ethos
Finally, our culture provides us with an ethos we must honor in
both thought and practice. By ethos, we mean a people's self-understanding
as well as its self-presentation in the world through its thought
and practice in the other six areas of culture. This cultural
self-understanding and self-presentation are best summed up in
the conclusion I posed in the MMM/DOA Mission Statement. The challenge
I posed there is the one I pose here as we move forward toward
the next millennium. It is above all a cultural challenge. For
culture is here defined as the totality of thought and practice
by which a people creates itself, celebrates, sustains and develops
itself and introduces itself to history and humanity. And so the
challenge of our culture is to come to the tasks before us, "bringing
the most central views and values of our faith communities, our
deepest commitments to our social justice tradition and the struggle
it requires, the most instructive lessons of our history, and
a profoundly urgent sense of the need for positive and productive
action. In standing up and assuming responsibility in a new, renewed
and expanded sense, we honor our ancestors, enrich our lives and
give promise to our descendants. Moreover, through this historic
work and struggle we strive to always know and introduce ourselves
to history and humanity as a people who are spiritually and ethically
grounded; who speak truth, do justice, respect our ancestors and
elders, cherish, support and challenge our children, care for
the vulnerable, relate rightfully to the environment, struggle
for what is right and resist what is wrong, honor our past, willingly
engage our present and self-consciously plan for and welcome our
future.
DR. MAULANA KARENGA is chairman of The Organization Us and
The National Association of Kawaida Organizations. He is also
professor and chair of the Department of Black Studies at California
State University, Long Beach; Dr. Karenga is also the creator
of Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba and author of numerous scholarly
articles and books including, Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family,
Community and Culture, Kawaida Theory: A Communitarian African
Philosophy; and Selections From The Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient
Egypt. Moreover, he was a member of the Executive Council of the
Million Man March/Day of Absence and author of the MMM/DOA Mission
Statement.
Illustrations courtesy of The University of Sankore Press,
2560 W. 54th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90043, 800-997-2656
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