In creating Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga drew on much older traditions. According to the official Kwanzaa website, harvest festivals from all over the continent provided inspiration. Such celebrations have been traced back as far as ancient Egypt, but Karenga's primary influence seems to have been the "first-fruits" celebrations in Southern Africa. He took the name from the Swahili phrase for first fruits, "matunda ya kwanza." According to Britannica, "kwanza" means "first" in Swahili, and the extra "a" was added to reach seven letters — one for each of the children who attended one of the first Kwanzaa celebrations.

Different groups throughout Africa still hold first-fruit festivals in December. In Swaziland, the festival is known as Ncwala and doubles as a celebration of the royal family. The Zulu people also combine the harvest with monarchial celebration under the name Umkhosi Wokweshwama. According to "Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Black Holiday," it was the Zulu tradition that first caught Karenga's eye in his research, and he acknowledged Umkhosi as the inspiration behind Kwanzaa's seven-day period in his "Kwanzaa" book.

If not a harvest holiday itself, crops still serve among the seven symbols of Kwanzaa. Per the University of Central Florida, fruits, nuts, and corn were chosen as decorations to connect Kwanzaa to its first-fruits inspirations. Ears of corn are another symbol, though they were chosen to represent human fertility rather than agriculture.

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