Wits University Press

Summary

I am struck by the understanding that we cannot fully grasp, on a large scale and in granular detail, the development of African modernities without first appreciating the challenges and hold of the past, of history and traditions. We will find it hard, for example, to understand how some people speak of their experience of modern African cities such as Lagos and Luanda, in contrast to how they speak of their experience of traditional life, without first understanding the store many people set by cultures and traditions while also struggling to have those cultures and traditions respond to their contemporary needs in African urban spaces.

Summary

Some gains for African-centred psychological work will issue from publishing internationally. There is little doubt about this. African-centred psychology must internationalise if it is to influence the world. If we do not universalise we shall not avoid ghettoisation.

I should be clearer. Of course it is always a little hard to persuade editors of ‘international’ journals – which is how journals published in the US and Western Europe are referred to in my country – and reviewers in other countries of the solidity and quality of your work, especially if such work goes against the orthodoxy of the discipline. The effort of persuasion is harder for some than for others. It is easier for those who are happy to go along with the globally hegemonic forms of knowledge, methods and tools of analysis, and harder for those who refuse to succumb to the orthodoxy. The latter is the case when it comes to African-centred work that fundamentally challenges how the world is ordered and perceived. In such cases, you have to sweat to convince editors and reviewers that Africa is a place of making thought. You are more than likely to have to work very hard to convince others that Africa is not only a site of data collection, but one where explanations and concepts – what is often pretentiously called Theory – are generated that are as valid as those from anywhere else in the world. It can be tiresome to put effort into trying to convince people that you, as a professional psychologist, have original thoughts, let alone that a ninety-year-old man who grows his own vegetables, raises his grandchildren, draws a government pension, but has never actually published an article, has a considered psychological perspective which should receive equal due to that of a psychology professor. Some will die spiritually or culturally – have died – trying to show some famous name who knows nothing about Africa and his students that African perspectives, conceptualisations and explanations matter.

But, again, there are some gains to be made, no doubt, from working to publish African-centred psychological research and theory with international publishers and in international journals.

Summary

The notion of centre, of centredness, or what Molefi Kete Asante (1991) refers to as centricity, is key to my efforts to contribute towards African-centred psychology. In his article ‘The Afrocentric idea in education’ published in The Journal of Negro Education, Asante writes: ‘centricity refers to a perspective that involves locating students within the context of their own cultural references so that they can relate socially and psychologically to other cultural perspectives’ (1991: 171). I have come to see how I have walked some of the same paths walked by other black scholars in African countries and in America, like Asante; I feel cheated, I am afraid, for not having known the notions of centricity and Afrocentricity when I was struggling with my voice, perspective and sense of alienation while teaching psychology, between October 1996 and April 2004.

In the same article Asante observes ‘that the most productive method of teaching any student is to place his or her group within the center of the context’ (1991: 171). In my view this is a self-evident truth, and hence something with which I totally agree – the utter significance of locating a student and his or her values and material structures of living at the centre of the context of learning. Learning is decidedly easier if students can relate the new content to something in their lives. It is hard to see something in your mind if you cannot see it, and even more so if you have no view of yourself. As Asante says in his book An Afrocentric Manifesto, Afrocentricity ‘is a theory of agency, the idea that African people must be viewed and view themselves as agents rather than spectators to historical revolution and change’ (2007: 17).

What I bring to psychology with the idea of being centred is that it is not applicable only to teaching and learning. A centred psychology, a centring of Africa in psychology, applies to research too. The first thing you start to appreciate when you wish to conduct a study from an African-centred psychological perspective is that the least alienating of light is cast on your topic and your participants if you place what philosophers refer to as lived experiences of the participants – their personal accounting of their own experiences – at the centre of your study.

Summary

What can you do with cultural African psychology? From a certain angle, values are at the heart of the science of human behaviour. Perhaps all human activity is always about values. If this is so, then value-based African psychology enables what no other kind of psychology has been able to do – that is, understanding human beings as value-driven. To study psychology from this orientation would be to study how people are driven by, make, contest and change values.

To illustrate the potential of cultural African psychology, consider most events we might read of in newspapers or witness in daily life. Whether it is in relation to the uplifting acts by Orlando Pirates soccer players Kermit Erasmus and Daine Klate in walking onto the pitch with their kids to collect their Nedbank Cup medals and trophy, or Boko Haram's abduction of more than two hundred girls in Chibok, Nigeria, or the trial of the athlete Oscar Pistorius for fatally shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, the question of how cultures are organised, what humans value, or what we believe about a range of phenomena is always in play. In the above examples, we see how footballers interact with their children (in a way that has become more widely acceptable only in recent decades, and was not commonplace in previous generations); how terrorists relate to girls and young women (abducting them and forcing them into marriage); how some men relate to their intimate partners (and the violence that attends such relationships). What connects these examples is the subject of men and masculinity, and some of the associations of masculinity with cultural beliefs and values. What research investigations from the vantage point of, and courses in, value-based African psychology might be able to offer in these instances are insights into the conditions that facilitate involved fatherhood among footballers; the prevalent kinds of relational norms and perceptions of girls and women among terrorists; and contradictions in enactments of, and discourses on, values on violence and love in intimate partnerships.

This is a well-known fact, but it might be useful to repeat it here: a culture that leaves emotional nurturance of children to women tends to be one in which men are left – leave themselves – to do the soccer playing, thinking, fighting, earning and politics.

Summary

Someone says, ‘Moving to New York gave me a whole new perspective on the world.’ What does she mean?

Or, at some point in your life, you may have said something like, ‘Johannesburg [or whatever place you have moved to] opened my eyes.’ What did you mean?

I say, becoming fully conscious to what it means to be you, to be awake to what it entails to be of African descent, to recognise yourself as black, to be white and born in Africa, or to be of a kind of heterogeneous heritage and identify with Africa, is what fundamentally shifts your understanding of the world, whether you are in Johannesburg or New York.

I say, taking time to learn how you are made to see the world, and then cultivating your own way of seeing the world, regardless of where you find yourself, is what opens your eyes.

Summary

Under what conditions would you consider a thesis, say a master's or doctoral study, as excellent that quotes only or mainly authors from Western Europe or North America?

I read many master's and doctoral theses in my areas of interests. Some I read so as to keep abreast of what students and young researchers are doing in the field. Others because I am asked to examine them. Many of these are adequate. In fact, I could say that many of these dissertations are more than just satisfactory when compared to some of the works I have read from universities outside Africa. But because of the colonial inferiorisation of intellectual work coming from Africa, both teachers and students often fail to recognise the warped and alienating standards they have set for themselves.

The inferiorisation of much of the intellectual thought produced in Africa is internalised by blacks and whites in Africa alike. We find here, then, an instantiation of what Harry Triandis (1994) was referring to: the fact that many psychology students and psychologists in Africa have an inferiority complex vis-a-vis American and Western European psychology. Dissertations are considered good merely because they quote all the ‘right sources’, and thus are associated with some amorphous external standard set in the West.

Sometimes, however, the standard is very well defined: you have to read this researcher or that theorist, and nearly ten times out of ten it is someone coming from Europe or America – John Bowlby or Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Stanley Milgram or Melanie Klein, Abraham Maslow or Max Wertheimer; you cannot not read this theory, explanation, or model and be passed.

The crucial point is not that these theorists do not have anything worthwhile to say about conditions in Africa. It is not to argue that there is nothing to learn from explanations about psychological life developed in Europe and America. It is, rather, that the idea of the West is being elevated to the standard against which we measure the excellence of the work itself. To repeat what I said earlier: we have to overcome these pervasive and debilitating inferiority complexes.

It is on this terrain that you come upon a terrifically thought-provoking problematic. Some of the master's and doctoral work I read is really superb.

Summary

Making the distinction between scholarly extraversion and introversion in African psychology is a way to reflect on the term ‘centring’. Scholarly extraversion and introversion are two end points of a continuum. The confusion and battles within African psychology revolve around the question of how psychologists might be able to locate themselves on this continuum.

To one side you find a psychologist who sees relatively little wrong with much of the psychology that she practises, or with many of the approaches to teaching and research that she employs, or with many of the therapeutic healing practices she uses on her clients. The thing is that, even though some of us may suspect that the way we live and where we work contribute, by omission if not commission, to socioeconomic injustice, or that the discipline of psychology is dominated by US and Western European patriarchal capitalist interests, we may feel that we are better off with the world of psychology as it is. Ironically, those who see nothing fundamentally off-colour with much of psychology as it is, include those of us who identify as social-justice-oriented psychologists. We may recognise and critique what is wrong with mainstream, non-critical, hegemonic psychology and its methods and explanations. But we do hold very dearly to, and our differentiation is marked by, our knowledge of our Brownmillers, Butlers and Cixouses, our Chomskys, De Beauvoirs and Derridas, our Du Boises, Foucaults and Lacans. That is to say, we privilege the major critical and radical European and US thinkers, be they male, female, or other genders/sexes, white, black, brown, or of other racially or ethnically defined groups. The centre of gravity of this offshore model of African psychology is Europe and the US. As an offshore, extraverted psychology, this African psychology primarily looks to places outside of the continent for legitimation and reward, using the locals mainly as a site of data extraction or application. This African psychology might be taught and written in some African universities, but it is actually epistemologically, ontologically, cognitively and emotionally invested elsewhere.

Summary

I have not always been fully conscientised to my complicity in perpetuating colonial and apartheid-informed models of knowledge, being in the world, and sociopolitical relations.

It is easier to explain why psychologists who are descended from the side of the colonial and apartheid oppressors may not be conscientised that the lesson they learned at home about what it means to be a white human can be oppressive of black humans. It is not hard to find reasons why psychologists who racially identify as white would be unaware of why apartheid models of knowledge are objectionable. But it is difficult to explain why psychologists descended from the side of the oppressed would not readily grasp that Euroamerican psychology was primarily intended to support the exploitation and control of African countries by the West and its middlemen. Like many psychologists from the ranks of the historically colonised, as a teacher and researcher I have not always admitted that standing in front of a class of students and teaching from a textbook that treats Africa as if it were a footnote always made me complicit in reproducing the dominance of Euroamerican psychology.

You do not have to be an outright collaborator with the enemy to be complicit in the oppression of your self-defined ‘own people’. You do not have to be a Lucas Mangope to sell out your people. (Mangope was one of the so-called black leaders of the fake black homeland of Bophuthatswana under the apartheid Bantustan system. The white apartheid government designated Bophuthatswana a republic for the Tswana-language speakers of South Africa. Any Tswana speaker was liable to be forcibly removed from white South Africa after Bophuthatswana had been given ‘independence’. Like other fake black homeland leaders, Mangope was more than happy with this fake independence as it made him the president of the fake republic.) You do not have to be an askari – the term given to the black turncoats who joined the security apparatus of the apartheid government. A teacher of psychology does not have to actively want to sell oppressive knowledge to black students. And of course there is a difference between those who actively supported the apartheid government as askaris and those who were passively complicit with apartheid policy.

Summary

Four more statements about African psychology (one has to do this again and again until African in African psychology becomes unconscious):

Summary

With a more materialist, political, or critical orientation, African psychology seeks to be attentive to the materiality or structures of daily life, including economic and political and other social institutions and structures. This is what I refer to as critical African psychology. As it concerns itself with structures that govern our lives, including our cognitive and emotional lives, another name we can give to this critical African psychological orientation is structural psychology. According to this stance, these institutions and structures are seen as shaping psychology, and a critical African psychology perceives itself as oppositionally situated, within yet against economic, political and other structures. Like the previous two orientations, critically oriented African psychology tends to be interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, appropriating its theories and methods from critical and radical African thought, critical Western psychology, and critical and radical Western thought more generally. Critical and structurally inclined African psychologists prefer to pose questions about the workings of power and knowledge in societies, institutions, groups, relationships and within psychology. This orientation is distinguished from cultural African psychology by its suspicious stance not only towards US and Western European psychology, but also towards all psychology and notions of culture.

Summary

Before the advent of the policy of separate development, some observers believed South Africa to be a multiracial national state. The historic victory of the Nationalist Party in 1948 changed all that. It is now common in certain circles in South Africa to talk in terms of multinationalism. It is claimed by some exponents of the policy of separate development that South Africa is a country consisting of many races, ethnic groups, languages and cultures. This, in fact, is true. The exponents go on to suggest that it is in recognition of this diversity that South Africa must be Balkanised into several national (ethnic) units.

Policy affecting the country as a whole may be decided on the basis of the above categories. It is questionable whether individual relations and group relationships between blacks and whites are motivated and supported by such considerations. These relationships appear to be determined at much lower and simpler levels. This seems to arise from the fact that in race-conscious environments, such as ours, it is difficult for individuals and groups to develop ways of action, feeling and thinking which transcend the categorical relationships involved in us (in-group) and them (out-group). ‘Us’ and ‘them’ constitute, in our society, a linguistic attitudinal form, expressive of distance and relation, and as such may be considered to be in the domain of Buber's philosophy of dialogue.

It will be shown in this essay that these categorical relations are related, in our society, to different experiences – two modes of being-in-the-world. These two existential experiences may be characterised as being-black-in-the-world and being-white-in-the-world. It has to be admitted that the primary mode of being-in-the-world, of existing, is a given, and is therefore universal. The differences between the white and black experiences of being-in-the-world have arisen because of the fact that man, unlike other lower animals, is a historical being.

There will be time to return to the above issues. But before that is undertaken, I would like to make some more general observations about the South African social environment.

The general issues relating to man's tribalism have been adequately treated by Niebuhr (1966). The concerns here are more specific than his, and relate to a particular environment with its historical and cultural contingencies.

Summary

There is more than one way of situating yourself, of course.

Summary

Above all else, African psychology refers to ways of situating yourself in the field of psychology in relation to and from Africa.

Summary

The question regarding the usefulness and psychological meaningfulness of the concept of African personality remains essentially undecided. A recent review of its status by a noted scholar, though probably the most well formulated in the literature, poses more questions than are answered: LeVine (1970), whose guarded reserve is evident, has lucidly isolated some of the most thorny issues attendant on the concept and its development.

Areas of specific agreement between this author and myself are the following: First, all reasonable and informed observers will agree that part of the stalemate in the development of the concept may in large measure be attributed to partisan stereotyping such as is represented in the contributions of Carothers (1953) and the Johannesburg psychologist, J.C. de Ridder (1961). Second, with respect to personality structure, LeVine makes the important observation that there are various possible levels of abstraction in the analysis and description of personality which must always be recognised in any attempt at formulating personality characteristics of a group of people. This valid point is not always recognised. Third, I also support the proposition that African societies and cultures as compared to others outside Africa are in important respects distinctive.

The methodological problems attendant on the concept of African personality in its psychological connotations are very aptly expressed by LeVine (1970) in the following statement:

Thus ‘the African personality’ cannot be more than a matter of statistical tendency and is likely to show less uniformity across African populations than do patterns of culture.

Contributions in the area have tended to highlight an obtrusive conceptual mix-up between ‘patterns of culture’ and what some authors have described as ‘personality’. This mix-up has been a direct result of the failure to conceptualise personality structure as being essentially stratified, as being made of core and outer possible levels of abstraction.

The apparent and real semantic and other problems associated with the concept of African personality appear upon reflection to be of a fairly simple nature. These difficulties vanish from the scene the moment due recognition is given to the following considerations: Rather than ask the unwieldy question: Is there an African personality? it appears more legitimate to reformulate this as: Is there an experiential repertoire which may be considered distinctly African? I will return to this question a little later.

Summary

The third orientation of African psychology, the more culturally, spiritually, religiously, metaphysically, philosophically inclined African psychology, situates the investigator and the investigated, the therapist and the client, the teacher and the student in a cultural world. This psychology also believes in spirits, in non-material entities such as God and ancestors, in other invisible dimensions that interact with this one. For the sake of convenience we have given the name cultural African psychology to this orientation; it is not a perfect name. As it concerns itself with values and beliefs and traditions and spirits and the supernatural, we can also refer to it as value-based psychology. Cultural or value-based African psychology begins by placing people in their cultural context, seeing practices from the people's cultural point of view. Philosophies of life, world views, life-worlds, cultures, traditions, beliefs, or values are placed at the centre of this psychology. The cultural effects of colonialism and apartheid racism are also seen as figuring prominently in the lives of Africans. The object of study is the person in their cultural, traditional, spiritual, or religious context, and the values and beliefs that shape the person. The problems of the person seeking counselling are seen to emerge from the dynamic between culture and person. An understanding of the culture is as important as an understanding of the person. The student who comes to the psychology class is seen as a cultural being, bringing his or her culture into the lecture room.

Summary

From a certain perspective, in the world in which I travel, through the multiple conversations I have with students, friends, colleagues and university administrators, and having taught and learned from many students, this is what I have come to realise: that talking with others about the benefits of putting Africa at the centre is of the utmost necessity, but to come to consciousness takes taxing self-work, too.

There is no denying it: the debates around African psychology can be a muddle. But more crucially, there has always been resistance to African psychology. And perhaps this will always be the case. There will be institutions that will resist a psychology that puts Africa and Africans at the centre. There will be people who will put up resistance – because of issues of personal power, miseducation, alienation, or for other reasons – even if putting Africa and Africans at the centre of psychology might benefit them or their children.

The simple reason for this resistance could be that a psychology that centres whiteness, Europe, or America is buried deeply in our social institutions. We do not just learn and transmit Euroamerican psychology. Western European and American psychology are in the psyche of African psychologists. And we inject them into our psychology students and patients in turn. If resistance to African psychology is a fact of this knowledge– power complex, we have to find ways to live with it, not necessarily on friendly terms, but with the recognition of its constant presence. We have to acknowledge that even people who are disoriented by Euroamerican psychology, and would benefit from understanding and grounding themselves within a better-situated psychology, can be resistant, because of the inferiority complex generated in them by the hegemonic form of psychology.

Summary

Or let us take community psychology. We can begin with a quick look at two textbooks on community psychology published in South Africa. They offer eye-opening lessons on this matter. The first book, Community Psychology in South Africa (second edition, published in 2012), is edited by Maretha Visser and Anne-Gloria Moleko. The second book, published in 2001, is Community Psychology: Theory, Method, and Practice. The editor is Mohamed Seedat, with Norman Duncan and Sandy Lazarus as consulting editors.

The textbook edited by Visser and Moleko has nineteen chapters covering topics such as mental health, HIV/Aids, different theoretical approaches, social support, crime and violence, substance abuse, poverty and inequality, race and intergroup relations. An intriguing aspect of this book, which declares itself to be embedded in South Africa, is that one of the chapters, written by Boshadi Semenya and Makgathi Mokwena (2012), seems to be aimed at presenting a more African take on community psychology. This is confused and confusing thinking. Imagine that the book was called Community Psychology in South Africa. South Africa is a country in Africa. To have a chapter on Africa in a book on Africa is muddled thinking. But it is also forced on many of us by the entanglement and contradictions caused by settler colonialism and apartheid that provoked a sense of South Africa as not African, or not-quite African. It may also be that the chapter falls into the trap of thinking of Africans primarily or only as defined by the religiously ‘cosmological’, of Africans as essentially mythological and spiritual in their reasoning. The chapter in question has the title ‘African cosmology, psychology and community’. What is eye-opening is that in this book written by South African authors and published in South Africa, the chapter by Semenya and Mokwena seems to be the only one expressly intended to give an ‘African’ perspective. In contradistinction to this, the rest of the book expresses an uncertain view as to whether it is African or not, or, more precisely, what kind of African it is. I contend that the mere fact of this book being edited and written by authors from Africa and published in an African country makes it a book on (African) community psychology. But of course it does not make it African-centred.

Summary

What causes all the confusion regarding Africancentredness in psychology?

I have already mentioned the usual suspects: economic domination, colonial attitudes, racism, marginalisation.

The generous part of my being thinks the confusion around African psychology and African-centred psychology may be due to plain old lack of education and obfuscation.

And then, at different moments, in various ways, among individuals within the groups that have been at the receiving end of Euroamerican psychology, I encounter self-delusion, feelings of personal power in people's own little dominion, or lack of imagination perhaps. Not every little bit of the confusion and lack of fervour for African-centred psychology flows out of misunderstanding, colonial sentiments and contemporary anti-black racism.

Yet there is little doubt in my mind that some of the apparent confusion is really about prejudice and hypocrisy. Both arise from coloniality and the discrimination that springs from a deeply embedded racism, in institutions and persons. It would be a grave error to believe that colonial and racist structures and attitudes are things of the past. I am concerned that, above all, for a certain category of students and teachers and professionals, the cause of the confusion begins with how we imagine African psychology as a whole – that is to say, what we imagine when the words ‘African psychology’ are uttered, what is African and what is psychology in African psychology, what are its boundaries and horizons, and what are its internal and necessary differences.

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