50 YEARS OF KWANZAA
Group raising awareness of cultural holiday
With Kwanzaa a little more than a week away, members of the SHAPE Community Center gathered in the Third Ward Saturday for an annual pre-Kwanzaa event designed to perform the African-American holiday’s seven principles.
“Celebration means nothing without practicing the things that you celebrate,” Deloyd Parker, SHAPE’s founder and executive director, said as residents ate, shopped and sorted bags of produce into boxes for their food co-op.
These actions, Parker said, exemplified the values of Kwanzaa: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith.
As the 50th anniversary of Kwanzaa approaches, SHAPE — which stands for Self-Help for African People through Education — is among the Houston institutions helping to educate residents about what some say remains an obscure holiday.
“Even among African-Americans, it’s still not well understood,” SHAPE board chair Nedzra Ward said from the kitchen, where lemon garlic shrimp and grits, waffles, pancakes, eggs, chicken and cinnamon rolls were on the menu. “People think they have to choose between Kwanzaa and Christmas. It was only through SHAPE that I came to understand what it was about.”
First celebrated in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, chairman of Africana Studies at California State University at Long Beach, Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday based on Afri- can harvest festivals and observed for seven days, from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1. Its name comes from the Swahili phrase meaning “fresh fruits.”
“It’s the harvest, the new beginning for the year,” Ward said. “We tell people to plant good fruit, good ideas, good behavior, and then we see what
you’ll reap from that in the following year.”
This year’s festivities organized by the Greater Houston Area Kwanzaa Planning Committee feature events on each of the seven nights, in locations throughout the city — from the Third Ward Multi-Service Center to Bethany Baptist Church in Trinity Gardens.
Parker said roughly 800 people attended per night in past years.
“This celebration brings you back to the center with a basic understanding of life — how to be able to work collectively and without negativity,” said artist Charles Washington, 60. “It’s not marketed at the level of the mainstream like it should be. It’s about edu- cating people.”
Saturday at SHAPE primarily was about community, however, whether or not attendees celebrated Kwanzaa.
“Every time I’m not doing something, I come here to keep myself positive,” said memorabilia collector Dwight Jenkins, 49. “Kwanzaa — it’s a good thing be- cause it’s different.”
But, he added, “I’m an old Santa Claus man.”