This holiday season, the New Black Panther Party’s national ministry of culture continues its annual call to have the Black community to adopt Khallid Abdul Muhammad’s New Afrikan alternative to Thanksgiving that is simply called ‘Gye Nyame!’

Gye Nyame means ‘none greater than God’ in the Akan language. Muhammad introduced the concept and performed the first ceremony in Cleveland in 1997. He brought it to New York and to New Jersey in November1998, only two months after the epic Millon Youth March. Upon his untimely death in 2001, it was picked up by Zayid Muhammad, his former chief of staff, who brought it into the New Black Panther Party. He has performed ceremonies for the Afrikan Poetry Theatre, CEMOTAP and others and has developed and widely circulated the ‘Gye Nyame concept paper,’ annexed here, so others may themselves adopt it and practice it.

          “It is not only a great way for a family to pass down valuable and important family history,” he explained.

“It is a fresh Afrikan way to help establish an appreciation for tradition, our tradition, within our families.”

          Unlike Thanksgiving, which ultimately is a holiday celebrating conquest over America’s indigenous population, Gye Nyame has no such genocidal baggage. It also, just as importantly, fosters a solemn awareness of both the American and the Afrikan holocausts, he finished…