Published Tuesday, December 12th, 2023
Dr. Darius Agoumba, professor of chemistry, will present about his home country of Benin (West Africa) at the Dec. 17 event.
A community Kwanzaa celebration will be held from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 17, at the Freedom Park community building (across from Wildcat Lanes) in Wayne. Dr. Darius Agoumba, a professor of chemistry at Wayne State College, will give a short presentation about his home country of Benin (West Africa) at the event.
The event will be hosted by That Ain’t Right (TAR), a social organization formed in Wayne in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
There will be African food, music, and artwork at the celebration. Come ready to learn, dance, sing, eat, and enjoy great fellowship. Admission is free and open to the public.
The Kwanzaa holiday was created in response to the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles by Dr. Maulana Karenga, professor and chairman of Africana Studies at California State University. He created the holiday, first celebrated in 1966, to bring African Americans together as a community.
The name Kwanzaa is derived from the phrase matunda ya kwanza, which means first fruits, or harvest, in Swahili. An extra “a” was added to the name to represent the seven principles of Kwanzaa:
- Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
- Kujichagulia (Self-determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create and speak for ourselves.
- Ujima (Collective work and responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems and to solve them together.
- Ujamaa (Cooperative economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
- Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
- Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
- Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
Kuumba – creativity – will be the theme, and Benin, a West African country, will be highlighted this year.
TAR is a group of like-minded individuals dedicated to bringing awareness of issues that African Americans face in the United States and the world. TAR has been celebrating Kwanzaa, along with Juneteenth, since 2020 when the group was first formed. The celebration has taken place at multiple places around Wayne, including via ZOOM during the COVID-19 pandemic.