Kinara

The kinara is the candleholder of Kwanzaa, made to hold seven candles in a row: three red, one black in the centre and three green. Maulana Karenga, who created the holiday in 1966, calls it a symbol of “our roots, our parent people”, the peoples of Africa.

Kwanzaa symbols. Also called kinara meaning, kwanzaa candle holder, kwanzaa kinara.

Meaning

Kinara (ki-NA-ra; Swahili stresses the last syllable but one) is the Swahili word for a candlestick. A. C. Madan’s Swahili-English dictionary of 1903 gives it two senses, a “small pillar, column” and a candlestick, and makes it the diminutive of mnara, a tower. In Kwanzaa it is one of the seven basic symbols. It stands on the mat, the Mkeka (the mat), and holds the seven candles; each evening of the holiday, Britannica writes, the family comes together to light one of them and to discuss the principle for the day. Kwanzaa runs from 26 December to 1 January. It is kept mainly by African Americans, and, in Britannica’s account, by Black people in Canada and the Caribbean and in other countries with large populations of African descent.

Origin and history

The kinara is as old as the holiday. Karenga devised the name and the celebration in 1966, and the official Kwanzaa website describes the kinara in his words: “symbolic of our roots, our parent people”, by which he means continental Africans. Writing in the Los Angeles Sentinel in 2024, he widened it. In principle and in practice the kinara stands for all the ancestors, “continental and diasporan”, he wrote, but at the beginning the stress was placed on continental roots, “to return us to the original source of our history, culture and coming-into-being as a people”. The International African American Museum in Charleston gives the same reading: the African ancestors and the lineage from which African Americans descend.

The kinara has no single prescribed shape. A diagram on the official website, “Lighting the Kinara during Kwanzaa”, shows a carved wooden holder with the seven candles in a straight line along its top. At a campus celebration that the scholar Frank Dobson described in 2017, a kinara “which contains seven holes” stood on a table covered in kente cloth, three red candles on its left, three green on its right and a black one in the centre. In December 2021 a large kinara stood on the corner of Broad Street and Wall Street, in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and the US Postal Service’s Kwanzaa stamp of 2022, its ninth, put a kinara with its seven lit candles in the foreground.

Kinara, candles and colours

Three Kwanzaa symbols meet in the candleholder, and the holiday keeps them apart. The kinara is the holder, and it stands for the ancestors. The candles it holds are a symbol of their own, the mishumaa saba, and they stand for the seven principles, the Nguzo Saba. Their colours come from the flag, the bendera: black for the people, red for their struggle and green for the future. In the order the official website gives for setting out the table, the cloth goes down first, then the mat, then the kinara on the mat, and then the candles in the kinara. “To place the candles in the kinara,” Karenga writes, “is to remind ourselves of the ancient culture in which our principles are rooted.”

Often confused with the menorah

The kinara is often taken for a Jewish menorah. Britannica notes the resemblance between the “seven-pronged kinara” and the “eight-pronged Jewish menorah”, says the kinara has no connection to Judaism, and calls Kwanzaa a strictly secular holiday. The lamp of Hanukkah has its own page here as the hanukkiah, and the seven-branched lampstand of the Temple as the menorah. What tells the kinara apart is its candles: seven, in three colours, black in the middle.

Sources

The Symbols of Kwanzaa (Official Kwanzaa Website), Organization Us, Official Kwanzaa Website, “The Symbols of Kwanzaa”; text summarised from Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture (University of Sankore Press, 2008), Official Kwanzaa Website (Organization Us), Primary Symbols: Kinara
The Celebration (Official Kwanzaa Website), Organization Us, Official Kwanzaa Website, “The Celebration”; text summarised from Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture (University of Sankore Press, 2008), Official Kwanzaa Website (Organization Us), Candle Lighting
Symbols and Insights of Kwanzaa: Deep Meanings and Expansive Message (Maulana Karenga, Los Angeles Sentinel, 2024), Maulana Karenga, “Symbols and Insights of Kwanzaa: Deep Meanings and Expansive Message”, Los Angeles Sentinel, 4 December 2024, Los Angeles Sentinel, paragraphs on the kinara and mishumaa saba
Swahili-English Dictionary (A. C. Madan, 1903), A. C. Madan, Swahili-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), Internet Archive (University of California Libraries scan), entries Kinara; Mshumaa; and the note on stress under M
Kwanzaa (Encyclopaedia Britannica), The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Kwanzaa”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, FAQs and article text
What Kwanzaa means for Black Americans (Frank Dobson, The Conversation, via PBS NewsHour), Frank Dobson (Vanderbilt University), “What Kwanzaa means for Black Americans”, The Conversation, 20 December 2017; republished by PBS NewsHour, 30 December 2021, PBS NewsHour, paragraphs on the author and a campus celebration; photo caption
Stamp Announcement 22-35: Kwanzaa 2022 Stamp (USPS Postal Bulletin), United States Postal Service, Postal Bulletin 22606, Stamp Announcement 22-35, United States Postal Service, stamp description
What is Kwanzaa? (International African American Museum), International African American Museum, Charleston, “What is Kwanzaa?”, International African American Museum, Seven Symbols of Kwanzaa

The same shape elsewhere

Browse symbols formed from lines.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

Added October 8, 2026.

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