IT is quite surprising to note that some Jamaicans want to celebrate a Black History Month as done in the United States, or to participate in the recently created Kwanzaa winter observances that fall around Christmas. Some American importations such as Coca Cola beverages, McDonald’s fast food, Uncle Ben’s rice, and Kentucky Fried Chicken are not entirely bad since they employ local workers and sometimes require some local ingredients. Imported American ideas, however, usually deserve closer scrutiny. Neither Black History Month nor Kwanzaa passes any respectable need-to-have test in Jamaica.

This is not to say that there is anything inherently erroneous in espousing a Black History Month, or even joining the commercial slide toward adding Kwanzaa as yet another marketing opportunity. But celebrating Black History and Kwanzaa did not originate from any overriding commercial need. They were individual responses by politicised subordinate groups in a society quite different from Jamaica. Both festivities are quintessentially made for the USA.

Black History Month, formerly Black History Week, was the brainchild of the eminent scholar, Carter G Woodson, the second African American after WEB Dubois to receive the degree of doctor of philosophy at Harvard University. Both Woodson and Dubois were distinguished intellectuals who deplored the biases and patent inadequacies of American society and especially of history. They vehemently opposed the marginalisation of black people in the USA. Rectifying those social omissions became the reason for their intellectual being.

Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and the following year created a journal, The Journal of Negro History, to disseminate new research on people of African descent. During the 1970s when black political sensibilities were undergoing fluid changes, the association modified its name and that of the journal to reflect the more acceptable term, Afro-American. In the 1920s, Woodson along with associates in the college fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, began advocating for a designated week in February to call attention to the neglect of non-white dimensions to the American reality. The selection of February reflected the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln who freed the US slaves and Frederick Douglas. But February also presented other important historical milestones such as the birth of Dubois, the congressional approval of the 15th amendment extending the franchise to black males, the taking of oath of the first black senator during reconstruction, and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. On February 1, 1960, a number of college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began a sit-in in a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and gave impetus to the ongoing civil rights movement. And it was on February 21, 1965 that three Black Muslims assassinated Malcolm X.

By the 1950s many cities and states recognised Black History Week celebrations. With the civil rights movement gaining strength in the 1970s, February was declared Black History Month in the USA and an increasing number of institutions began to recognise the occasion and support various forms of observances. Black History Month has become a sort of collective catharsis for the centuries of neglect of African-American history and marginalisation of American non-whites.

Kwanzaa does not have quite the intellectual pedigree or honourable genesis of Black History Month. Instead, it grew out of the radical Black Nationalist movement of the 1960s. Ron Karenga (the self-designated new name of Ronald McKinley Everett, a Black Power activist) created Kwanzaa in 1966 as a seven-day black alternative to Christmas and white American culture. Over the years Karenga has given many explanations for Kwanzaa. In the 1960s he declared that his aim was to “give blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and to give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society”. Later the explanations would vary from allowing African Americans to reconnect with their African past to a community celebration of blackness.

Karenga described Kwanzaa as recognising the seven principles of Kawaida, a Swahili term for tradition and reason. Each of the seven days of celebration is dedicated to one of the principles of Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith). Kwanzaa ceremonies sometimes include drumming, ritualised drinking, lighting a candle each day, feasting and the exchange of simple Swahili phrases such as Abari gani, which roughly translates as “How are you?”

Eventually Kwanzaa gained a sort of general acceptance, with the US postal service issuing two commemorative stamps and Hallmark greeting cards getting into the act. In 2004 a small research organisation estimated that 1.6 per cent of its survey, extrapolated at about 4.7 million Americans, observed the holiday and President George Bush even issued a Kwanzaa message that year. Nevertheless, very few Americans can trace their roots to East Africa. The Kwanzaa use of Swahili phrases is contrived and the ritual resembles a watered-down version of the Jewish Hanukah or Festival of Lights.

Black History Month and Kwanzaa grew out of a minority population that had been oppressed and marginalised for centuries in the USA and whose self-confidence and self-esteem had been aggressively denigrated. That has not been the case in the Jamaican and Caribbean experience. Throughout the Caribbean non-whites have comprised the majority of the population almost everywhere. They have shaped mainstream society in fundamental ways as Brian Moore, Michele Johnson, Patrick Bryan, Barry Higman and Swithin Wilmot have demonstrated in excellent histories. Moreover, authors of Caribbean histories represent some of the most path-breaking research in the fields of the humanities and the social sciences. Jamaicans do not need a month to focus on their history or to imitate irrelevant foreign rituals. They simply need to make their history a more fundamental part of their formal and informal education throughout the year. That history will show that for much of the modern era the Caribbean held an important position in a wider Atlantic world that was shaped largely by locally enslaved and free people.