25 December 2008


Kwanzaa !  Chronia polla !

The first time I heard the word "kwanzaa !" (it needs the old tom-tom throb of an exclamatio), I just fell about laughing at the very sound.

When they told me what it was about I thought what a wizard marketing ploy but I didn't see it getting off the ground, for some reason.

But what a lovely multi-talented ονοματοποιΐα it is, to be sure.

Can't you see it: a fleet-footed messsenger bursting from the brush, embossed despatch from Government HQ in cleft stick: "Kwanzaa ! B'wana !  You got mail!"  

Kwanzaa ! Chronia polla !" The perfect all-purpose greeting.

I take it less and less seriously each time I hear it, and here in Greece of course they just look at you curiously if you try to describe the concept ... but now comes an article that feeds my mirth and scepticism like a stuffed turkey, not to mention settling my cynical suspicions once and fo' all.

1 comment :

sibadd said...

It's astounding that that bullying mountebank Ron Everett with his diploma mill qualifications is still - or nearly still - going. I was at Michigan in the late 60s and 70s and we had him bang to rights then - the kind of egotist fit for the purposes of intelligence services. Kwanzaa hasn't been taken seriously by Black people here - possibly because we have more Africans among our Afro-Caribbean neighbours to help laugh the idea to scorn - if the even heard of it. We also have people who know their history. A local website describing Kwanzaa hasn't had a hit. I blame a certain kind of guilty white political idiocy for this toxic nonsense - an adult version of the youth my kids (and other black kids) once called wiggers. I'd ignore it were it not for the Home Office funding these rogues control. We had a nasty couple of days of street disorder in Handsworth, three years last September, resulting in the murder of Isiah Young-Sam, a bright schoolboy on his way home, in 2005 because Home Office funded websites and two local radio stations (similarly funded) circulated and amplified a lie that asian's had gang-raped a black girl.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Birmingham_riots
That I should be reading this in 2008!It's good to hear Kwanza's dead or dying but Tom Wolfe wrote 'Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers' in 1970. It's not that there isn't a place for guilt and knowledge of harm done in history. It's what you do with it that matters.