“With confidence, you have won before you have started.”
— Marcus Garvey
The final candle burns. Seven days of intention close where all things begin and end: with faith. Garvey understood this. He declared that with confidence, victory precedes action. The outcome settles before the work commences. Imani, the seventh principle, anchors everything we have built across these Kwanzaa nights.
Imani translates as faith, though translation flattens the fuller meaning. The declaration we make on this day carries the weight: to believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle. War-room faith. The kind that sustains movements and raises children and refuses the seductions of despair.
Garvey built an empire on such faith. He organized millions across oceans and continents without the internet, without television, without any technology beyond the printing press and the human voice. He believed in our capacity before we proved it. He saw what we could become and treated that vision as evidence. His confidence moved ships and founded businesses. It created the first and largest mass movement of Black people in the Western Hemisphere.
We light the green candle on this final night because faith points toward the future. Green is the color of the continent we revere and the harvest we anticipate. Imani asks us to weigh the evidence of our wounds against something heavier: the record of our survival, the persistence of our genius, the undeniable fact that we are still here making meaning in a world designed to erase us.
Practical faith requires practice. We teach our children our history so they know the ground beneath them holds. We name our ancestors aloud, so the dead remain present. We gather in circles, even small ones, because isolation corrodes belief. We protect our elders because their memory is our archive.
The doubt will come. It always does. Garvey was deported, imprisoned, slandered by his own. Karenga faced years of darkness before Kwanzaa found its footing. Every ancestor whose name we carry knew seasons of defeat. Imani holds that suffering yields to something larger. The struggle continues because we continue. Our victory is already written in the fact of our persistence.
Tonight, we carry the seven principles cycle through our lives, each one feeding the others, none complete without the rest. Imani crowns the sequence because everything we have practiced this week requires belief to sustain. Unity needs faith to hold. Purpose needs faith to endure. Economics needs faith to serve the right people.
Garvey called us to believe in ourselves before the world gave us permission. Kwanzaa gives us seven days to rehearse that belief in the company of those we love. The candle burns low. The declaration rises.
Imani!
Faith!
