Happy Kwanzaa Black Trans Style-The 2011 Remix

Haban gani?   What's the news?   

Monday will begin the first day of the Kwanzaa celebration, which will run until January 1. 

Over those seven days the estimated 4 million people who celebrate the holiday will once again familiarize themselves with the seven Nguzo Saba principles of it and ponder each one of them.

Last year I wrote a series of Kwanzaa themed posts that took each one of the seven principles and explained how they applied to the chocolate trans community and our cis African descended brothers and sisters.

Just as a refresher course, here are those seven principles that are celebrated each night:

• Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
• Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, 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 heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

I'm going to do another series of posts in which I focus on the Nguzo Saba, how they apply to my chocolate trans community and the GLB/SGL and cis African American ones we interact with. 

I received some positive feedback about that 2010 series of Kwanzaa posts and some of you informed me that the posts I wrote were inspiring to you as well.

Now that I've made the decision to do another seven days worth of Kwanzaa posts for 2011, I pray that I exceed the standards I set with last year's series.

I hope you enjoy what I have to say about the Nguzo Saba principles and how they apply to our African descended community taking this year's developments into account as I ponder them.

For those of you who celebrate Kwanzaa, as you light the candles on the Kinara, I hope that each post serves to illuminate positive thoughts about my chocolate transgender community and the symbiotic connection we have with you and those Nguzo Saba principles in a way you haven't contemplated them before.