The Final Call

Karenga: We must remake ourselves and the world

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Dr. Maulana Karenga Photo: Andrea Muhammad

Speaking in the academic cadence of a master jazz improvisationalist, Dr. Karenga, creator of Kwanzaa, asked the key question of how do Blacks take our culture and extract the paradigm of human excellence, achievement and possibility and enrich our lives and crystallize our reality? “We are not to forget our history of struggle against all odds,” he instructed. “The history of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and so many more, that’s why we can’t walk away from our history. To do so would be to walk away from our humanity.”

Dr. Karenga went on to say we are morally obligated to bear witness to the truth, to set the scales of justice in their proper place among those who have no voice. “We must ask ourselves who is afraid of the big white wolf. We like Harriet Tubman must not escape slavery or in servitude and seek a comfortable position, he pointed out.

“This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Kwanzaa. Kwanzaa has united us reaching across all continents.” Likening Kwanzaa as a cultural tool he said, “We must continue to strengthen our culture of struggle. A culture that goes back centuries against evil, injustice, and oppression of every form.   It is righteous to resist and ours goes back to colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism when it came to the African continent.   Each day we must get up and repeat the mantra it is a good day to struggle for struggle is always on the agenda.”

Pointing out the theme of the conference, “It’s Nation Time Again,” Dr. Karenga said it speaks to the need for us to rebuild our community. “For the nation as a whole is a community, a source of commonality and kinship, shared values, common culture, history, life condition and identity,” he continued. “Without culture we don’t exist.” 

Black people need to see culture in its most expansive form, he added. “We must be cultural nationalist rooted in thought and practice. For a people to be free it must be rooted in its own culture. It’s always a duel struggle, a struggle within and a struggle without.”

Dr. Karenga offered a definition of Black power as a struggle for self-determination and self-respect. “In this continuous struggle, there must be reparations or the repairing of self. It is beyond compensation,” he offered.

“I want to see reparations as the repairing and healing of ourselves, in the process and practice of repairing and remaking the world. We must repair and remake ourselves while remaking the world that injured us,” said Dr. Karenga.

He used the example of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, patriarch of the Nation of Islam as an example of this line of thinking. Mr. Muhammad said he wanted “a new world and a new us,” Dr. Karenga told the audience. “You can’t operate from old racist thought which leads you just seek a comfortable place in oppression,” he succinctly pointed out.

We must use the basic principals of the Nguzo Saba (the Seven Principals of Kwanzaa) to build mutual respect and reciprocity, said Dr. Karenga.

“We must continue to struggle, keep the faith, hold the line, love our people, speak the truth, demand justice, be constantly concerned with the well-being of the world  and all that are in it, and dare to rebuild an overarching collective movement.”