Update on Kwanzaa
A few posts ago I wrote my annual rant against Kwanzaa as a seven step program to socialism. I concluded that if blacks in America wanted to stay poor and under the power of others, they could take no better step than to pursue the seven values in Kwanzaa.
In a stunning gap in my reading, I have never read PJ O'Rourke's "Eat the Rich." However, David Boaz reports this interesting snippet from the book:
In Tanzania he gapes at the magnificent natural beauty and the
appalling human poverty. Why is Tanzania so poor? he asks people, and
he gets a variety of answers. One answer, he notes, is that Tanzania is
actually not poor by the standards of human history; it has a life
expectancy about that of the United States in 1920, which is a lot
better than humans in 1720, or 1220, or 20. But, he finally concludes,
the real answer is the collective "ujamaa" policies pursued by the sainted post-colonial leader Julius Nyerere. The answer is "ujaama"”they planned it. They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy."
For those not familiar with Kwanzaa, Ujamaa is one of the seven principals celebrated in Kwanzaa.
