Kuumba Closing Ceremony: 28th Annual Colorado Springs Citywide Kwanzaa Celebration

All around the world, on every continent and throughout the African community, African people, in the name and framework of Kwanzaa, will gather together to celebrate themselves.

This year, as always, they will celebrate family, community and culture. That is to say, they will celebrate the good, beauty and sacredness of their lives, the indispensable caring, sharing and shielding foundation of family and community and the ancient, rich, varied and instructive cultural values and practices that ground Kwanzaa, define them as a people, and direct them forward on the upward paths of ancestors.

Indeed, at the heart and center of the holiday, Kwanzaa is concern with and stress on embracing and practicing core values: the Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles) and related communitarian African values. Nguzo Saba are a Black value system, a set of communitarian African values which aid in grounding oneself righteously and rightly, directing lives toward good and expansive ends, and toward conceiving and bringing into being the good communities, societies and world all want and work and struggle so hard to bring into being.

The Kuumba (Creativity) Closing Ceremony emphasizes the sixth principle of the Nguzo Saba. Kuumba is a commitment to being creative within the context of the national community vocation of restoring our people to their traditional greatness and thus leaving community more beneficial and beautiful than it was inherited. Spoken word, poetry, and the sharing for this day highlights Kuumba in the creative restoration of traditional African cultural values.