Second of two parts
Re “The Meaning and the Beauty of the Tradition of Kwanzaa”
[img]2361|right|Ms. Chimbuko Tembo||no_popup[/img]A the dawn of the seventh and final day of Kwanzaa, the African American cultural festival joyously celebrated around the world by those of African heritage, Chimbuko Tembo continues her evaluation.
Ms. Tembo is associate director of the African American Cultural Center, on 48th Street near Crenshaw Boulevard for the past nine years.
Kwanzaa was fathered 47 years ago by Dr. Maulana Karenga, chair of the Dept. of Africana Studies at Cal State Long Beach. It is a trip into African peoples’ history, reviving, refreshing, renewing cultural values that have sustained them for centuries.
“We celebrate communitarian values that teach us to be other-directed,” said Ms. Tembo. “We should not be so much concerned with giving as we are with receiving.”
The native Angeleno has replaced Christmas in her life, for more than 30 years, with Kwanzaa, which she long ago found more meaningful for her.
“I have many friends and many family members who celebrate both Christmas and Kwanzaa,” she said. “They understand there is no conflict.”
Ms. Tembo subtracted Christmas from her late Decembers (Kwanzaa starts on Christmas Eve and concludes on New Year’s Day) not because she found fault with it but for positive reasons.
“As I became more aware of African culture, I began to understand, and to know through study and other people, that African people had their own religious traditions before the holocaust of enslavement.
“I wanted to be grounded in my own traditions as an African person, not,” she emphasized, “to be anti-Christmas or anti-Christian. I just want to be grounded in my own culture, my own people, my own sense of humanity.”
