Get Your Holiday(s) On! Kwanzaa with Sankofa Community Connection

Kwanzaa, a Celebration of Community, Family and Culture will take place on Wednesday, December 18^th, from 5:30 to 7pm at East Bay Met, Newport Campus, 115 Girard Ave, in Newport.

Presented by Sankofa Community Connection, the free community event will feature performances by the Rhode Island Black Storytellers and the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading.

About Kwanzaa

Kwanzaa is a week-long annual celebration held in the United States and other nations of the African diaspora in the Americas to honor African heritage in African-American culture. It is observed from December 26 to January 1, culminating in gift-giving and a feast. Kwanzaa has seven core principles (Nguzo Saba). It was created by Maulana Karenga and was first celebrated in 1966.

Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the following principles, as follows:

• 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.