Karenga, Maulana Ndabezitha

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Karenga, Maulana Ndabezitha

1941–
African American scholar-activist, educator, social theorist, and social ethicist.

One of the most important figures in recent African American history, Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga has played a major role in black political and intellectual culture since the 1960s. The impact of his ideas and work can be seen in the development of various social and intellectual movements. These movements include black studies, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, the Simba Wachanga (Young Lions) youth movement, Afrocentricity, ancient Egyptian studies within black studies, rites of passage, independent black schools, and the 1995 Million Man March, for which he wrote the official mission statement. Karenga holds two Ph.D. degrees, as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Durban-Westville, South Africa, for his “intellectual and practical work on behalf of African people.”

Karenga is best known for creating the African American and pan-African holiday Kwanzaa and authoring the definitive book on the subject, Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and Culture (1998). He is currently professor and chair of the Department of Black Studies at California State University, Long Beach, executive director of the African American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, California, and chair of The Organization Us and of the National Association of Kawaida Organizations.

Karenga was born Ronald McKinley Everett in Parsonsburg, Maryland, and moved to Los Angeles in 1958. He attended Los Angeles City College, where he became the first black student body president. He participated in the Civil Rights Movement, the peace movement, and protests against capital punishment. He also began to embrace black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, reading the works of major black thinkers W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Aimé Césaire, Sékou Touré, and Julius Nyerere, among others.

Transferring to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1961, Karenga continued to study continental African and African American culture and social thought and began to formulate the outlines of a philosophy based in African culture, which he came to call Kawaida. During this time he met black nationalist leader Malcolm X. Karenga embraced some of Malcolm's basic tenets, and later he saw himself and The Organization Us as heirs and keepers of Malcolm's legacy. At UCLA he earned his bachelor's degree in political science in 1963 and his master's degree in political science with a specialization in African studies in 1964. He began to work on his doctorate but withdrew from his studies to join the Black Freedom Movement after the Watts Riot of 1965.

During this period, Karenga emerged as a leader in what became known as the Black Power Movement. In 1965 he founded The Organization Us (Us meaning “African people”), a social and cultural change organization, and advocated cultural revolution as an indispensable aspect of the liberation struggle. Having developed his Kawaida philosophy and the related Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles), he created the Kwanzaa holiday in 1966 to promote these principles and the communitarian African philosophy out of which they evolved. These principles are umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith). Through The Organization Us and his philosophy, Karenga was able to help shape some of the major movements since the 1960s.

Karenga's books on Kawaida philosophy offer a critical discussion of his philosophy as well as a view of the course of its development, as seen in Essays on Struggle: Position and Analysis (1978) and Kawaida Theory: An Introductory Outline (1980). The reader sees in these works Karenga's initial emphasis on nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and African socialism turn into a broader conception of Kawaida as “an ongoing synthesis of the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world.” This exchange includes concerns such as Womanism, classical African studies, multiculturalism, and environmentalism.

After the decline of the Black Power Movement in the 1970s, Karenga returned to university life, finishing his doctorate in political science at United States International University in 1976 and teaching at various universities as a visiting professor. Contributing to the scholarly discourse on the field and mission of black studies, Karenga worked with his colleagues to build the National Council for Black Studies and wrote Introduction to Black Studies (1982), generally considered the standard introductory text in the discipline.

Turning to the study of ethics and classical African culture, Karenga focused on ancient Egyptian ethical texts. His magnum opus is an 803-page dissertation titled Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics (1994), which he wrote for his second doctorate in social ethics at the University of Southern California. He states that this work is one of “both interpretation and transmission” directed toward presenting the ancient concept of Maat “in the language of modern moral discourse” and demonstrating its capacity for “inspiring and sustaining modern ethical philosophic reflection.” Two of his other works in this area are Selections from the Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt (1984) and The Book of Coming Forth by Day: The Ethics of the Declarations of Innocence (1990).

Influenced by the works of Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, Karenga's scholarship in ancient Egyptian culture is, by his own description, “part of an ongoing and larger project of Africana studies, a kind of intellectual archaeology directed toward recovering and reconstructing classical African cultures as sources of possible paradigms for enriching and expanding modern African intellectual discourse and culture.” Continuing this work, he wrote Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings (1999), a collection and translation of the ancient sacred text of the Yoruba, a group of West African peoples, with accompanying commentary. As with the Husia, his interest here is in using an ancient classical African text to address the compelling issues of contemporary times from an African-centered perspective. According to Karenga, these issues revolve around “thoughts and concerns about living good and meaningful lives, improving the human condition and enhancing the human prospect.”

See also Black Nationalism in the United States; Black Power in the United States.

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