Allan Appel Photo
Dance teachers Shari Caldwell and Elaine Peters.
Seventy-five people gathered to shout “Ashay!”, a resounding Swahili “Yes!”, as they brought Kwanzaa to the Hill.
Robin Hobson-Sims.
The festive dance and music scene Tuesday night was the community room at Wilson Branch Library, where Sisters With a New Attitude (S.W.A.N.A.) convened its third annual celebration cum seminar featuring “a rekindling of Kwanzaa principles.”
Robin Hobson-Sims remembered her first Kwanzaa, a 1960s-vintage Black Power movement creation.
At that time Hobson-Sims was an undergraduate at Howard University in Atlanta. She described it as a movement “so rich, we had music and food and pride, so rich and literate.”
She credited the movement with introducing her to figures such as Marcus Garvey and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
“It was driven both by politics and culture; it was so real, ” she said.
Much of the cultural aspect was on display Tuesday night as longtime Afro-Caribbean folk dance teacher Elaine Peters and Shari Caldwell coordinated performances ranging from ballet to limbo to hip hop.
Both Tafoni Hargrove and Hannah Haynes, who study at the Shari Caldwell Dance Center, said they polished up their plies for the graceful ballet they staged with the rest of their company at the beginning of an evening of performances.
Punctuating the dance performances were lessons explaining the seven principles of Kwanzaa ‚which celebrate family, community, and cultural creativity.
New Havener Lonna Leak was at her first Kwanzaa celebration, brought there by area musician and producer (and horse shoe champion) Glenn Ellis.
She pronounced the evening “awesome.” She held aloft signs of each of the Kwanzaa principles for the audience to practice. The third of the seven principles, Ujima, refers to collective work and responsibility.
Hobson-Sims, who recently retired after 24 years as a substance abuse counselor for the state Department of Corrections, called it a little frustrating to try to get it all the ideas in during one evening or even one period of the year. Kwanzaa runs generally between Christmas and New Year’s.
“We should take the whole year to do it. It seems like we’re still introducing it,” she said.
In her experience, more context is needed for African-Americans to appreciate Kwanzaa. She said she has a brother who’s a Jehovah’s Witness. He objects to the holiday as challenge to his Christianity. Hobson-Sims said Kwanzaa and its values have just enriched her experience of Christmas as a Christian.
“To me the Christmas tree [and its attendant store bought presents] had taken over,” she said.
Now she makes many of her own gifts by hand. What’s important to her are “love, truth, dance, music, the smile of kids, community,” she said. “Give ‘em something rich to build on, but please, I’m a Christian!”
Another SWANA member, Pearlye Sams Allen, said the key distinction is that Christmas is a religious holiday, whereas Kwanzaa is cultural.
SWANA President Deborah Elmore said that each year the Kwanzaa celebration emphasizes a different Kwanzaa-related theme. Tuesday night’s was the importance of celebrating and supporting black-owned businesses, especially of the cultural variety.
To that end Gerald Moore, the project coordinator of the Winchester Revitalization Art Project, was on hand to show his original sculptures and African masks, as well as this wari board.
That device serves as a bean game, and also an abacus on which to do business math and to communicate if Africans didn’t speak the same language, he explained.