In 2015, South African universities rang with loud calls for the decolonisation of higher education. The call is still out: how to design African-centred, decolonised university undergraduate courses, advanced professional programmes and research studies in psychology?

The Forum for African Psychology (FAP) was founded in 2009 as a division of the Psychological Society of South Africa. The establishment of the FAP followed long-standing debates on the object of African psychology, its definition, its status, its aims and its approaches. The FAP's founding has reignited these debates. But there is still often more heat than light produced about what African psychology is. There is confusion as to why we might or might not need to develop students and young researchers who are conscientised to be unselfconscious about their African psychological perspective.

Is it not ludicrous, a confused alien could well ask, do we need an African psychology forum in South Africa?

An answer the alien might receive is, we need such a forum because South Africa is not African enough.

Or, because the Psychological Society of South Africa is not African enough.

The question becomes, what is it to be African enough in a place like South Africa, in contrast to places like Somalia and Senegal?

Of course, an African-centred psychologist can say, ‘I study cognitive development from an African perspective.’ But the moment you utter those words, despite your apparent aim in doing so, you have already betrayed your real intention. Your real intention is to persuade the audience of the rightness of your study. As such, you have undermined the potential influence of the study.

Western- or Euroamerican-oriented African psychology considers African psychology as the study of behaviour (in African settings). This is an orientation (stance, position, perspective) towards Western Europe and the US which occupies the mainstream of psychology in South Africa. It is deeply influenced by a feeling, sometimes a belief, maybe a clearly spelled-out view or one that is implicit, that Western psychology is by definition psychology. Not African psychology – that is something else.

Western-oriented African psychology makes up the core content and concepts of what is taught in universities, the therapeutic modalities used in consulting rooms and psychiatric hospitals, and the research work that is published in journals and books. We are taught to accept the psychology topics and approaches and tools and interpretations and psychotherapeutic modalities coming from Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and a great deal more so from the US. And these are the things that we who are teachers teach our students. We come to believe that work from Somalia and Surinam, or Cameroon, Chile and China, is not quite psychology. We certainly struggle to think of those who have not qualified as doctors of psychology or psychotherapists as professionals able to help in alleviating psychological pain, or to explain the meaning of happiness (unless they belong in a fashionable category, like monks).

A Western-oriented African psychology stance assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that psychology is an undivided science. Some who subscribe to this stance believe that psychology is a science in the way that astronomy and chemistry are sciences – that is to say, that it is ever apolitical and value-neutral. But psychology is informed by politics and values in a way that natural scientists can never grasp. Many psychologists also fail to grasp the value-laden nature of their discipline. Or maybe they refuse to face up to the reality that humans are not stars, and societies are not chemicals.

Confusion about decolonisation is as pervasive as that about African-centredness. What is needed is more than just a simple clearing up of this persistent confusion. We are in need of strategies, of innovations. We have to keep going until we completely undo the widespread miseducation about, and deeply buried alienation from, decolonised African-centred psychological knowledge. We need to talk. Learn from each other. Teach one another.

Euroamerican psychology (in Africa) has been influenced by colonial power in Africa. That means, unconsciously or consciously, that those psychologists in Africa who are uncritical of Euroamerican-centred ideas are passively supportive of a history of ideas infected with colonialism.

In 1949, Rene Maunier (1887–1951), a member of the French Academy of Colonial Sciences and professor at the University of Paris, who is said to have been a sociologist of North Africa, wrote this:

Who believes this? Colonisation was no mere communication. Nor was it miscommunication. Colonisation was about the conquest of land and people. It was like an infection. It was about power, sometimes exercised in cruel and dehumanising ways. It was about control of populations and the colony.

There is more. Colonisation goes beyond the control of the colonised land and the bodies of the colonised. The coloniser always aims to extract anything of value from the colony for the benefit of those who wield power in the metropole or those who live in the white areas of the colony. Colonialism always reconfigures the economy and politics of the colony. At the same time, it rearranges pre-existing social and cultural structures in the colonised territory to support its economic aims. But here is what does not always receive full treatment – except by some radical thinkers in Africa and elsewhere: colonisation sets out to restructure the very behaviour, desires, interrelations and identities of the subject group and their colonisers, and succeeds in doing so. That is to say, it reconfigures the psychology of the individuals and the groups in the colony.

Can we see colonisation as intercommunication? No. As the anti-colonial Martiniquan poet and politician Aime Cesaire (1913–2008) said in his Discourse on Colonialism, first published in French in 1955, ‘colonization = “thing-ification”’. Here, in a little more detail, is what he says to lead up to this structuring equation:

This exercise has been an invitation to African-centred psychology. It is an invitation to those who are done with being alienated to contribute towards the development of an internationalist African-centred psychology. It is a call for a psychology that places Africans centre-stage in working out the meaning of their own lives. It is about knowing Africans, from psychologists and students of psychology to the many lay African publics, from a disalienated position, which is one of resisting, overcoming, or working through feelings and the sense of being unloved and misrecognised. It is a call for thinking about who you are, in relation to yourself and others. It is about learning about the world from within your own embodiedness and locatedness in the world, and so achieving what we can call a sense of relatedness.

African-centred psychology is, centrally, about experiencing the self and the world from a place in Africa. This place is not one place. But whatever home is for you, that is the place from which you go out into the world.

African-centred psychology is an emancipatory psychology that aims to help students, researchers, therapists and activists, within as well as outside Africa, to engender a stronger position for psychological insights from Africa.

This, then, has been a call inspired by the space that has reopened in several places on the continent to make Africancentred psychological thought and practice. A call that sees an opportunity for radical, critical, anarchist and social-justiceoriented psychologists from Africa and other parts of the world to contribute towards their own demarginalisation and disalienation. A call to break free from the conceptual prison created by psychology coming from the US and Western Europe – a psychology that we ourselves have supported. A call to contribute to thinking Africa in the world.

It is no exaggeration to say that such a simple conception of African-centred psychology – that the term ‘African’ in African-centred psychology attains its key objective if it has become redundant – is perhaps the most important idea a psychology student, teacher or researcher will come to hold. Along with the idea of African-centred psychology as a way of seeing from somewhere, it is certainly the single most significant idea about psychology I have arrived at since I began my career as a university teacher and researcher.

In comparison to psychologists, philosophers are often keener to trouble how we think through such a thing as ‘thinking from Africa’. You do not necessarily have to plough through Kwame Appiah, Angela Davis, Cheikh Anta Diop, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Paulin Hountondji, Adrian Piper, Leopold Senghor, Cornel West, Kwasi Wiredu and the many other philosophers who have arrived at this reference- frame-altering notion. (Of course, you can also seek help in the works of well-known names – Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Rene Descartes, Michel Foucault, Plato, or Jean-Paul Sartre – but my suspicion is that they will not have a ready answer for you.) I propose that a simple but consciousness-shifting insight such as this is not to be found in any of the abstruse philosophy books you might read. Coming to consciousness about Africa in psychology, as distinct from psychology in Africa, needs more than reading. It is of some help to read, do not misconstrue me. Writing and reading form a kind of discussion, certainly. That is why I have set time aside to put together this slim volume of thoughts: so that it can be read. Perhaps, in the age of Facebook, you will ‘like’ it. But I would be most satisfied if I were to be challenged about this conception.

A fuller understanding of, say, the (African) psychology of men's aggression – that is to say, of the psychology of men as always a psychology from a place of men in a place – demands that we do other kinds of work than simply reading Euroamerican psychological texts: legwork, searching, looking at the men with our own eyes, learning to see the world through the men's eyes, talking to one another, learning together, being open to each other's criticisms.

Is the name ‘African psychology’ not constraining? Of course the name ‘African psychology’ has real constraints. But remember that the term ‘African’ in African psychology is supposed to be silent.

The limitations of a term like ‘African psychology’ include how, more than a label like ‘US psychology’ or ‘South African psychology’, this term can burnish stereotypes of Africa as a special case. African psychology is not a special psychology. There is a very clear need to have something called ‘African psychology’. Sometimes. It is a psychology that seeks to speak in its own name. A psychology from a part of the world that has been historically excluded in thinking about the world. A part of the world that finds it ludicrous that hypotheses, explanations and tools of a psychology meant for Western Europeans or Americans dominate African countries. ‘Sometimes’ points to the fact that it is often necessary for those who do psychology on the peripheries of the world, particularly when they have to communicate with and orient those at the centres of the world of psychology, to retain labels like ‘African’, ‘Chinese’, or ‘Latin American psychology’. As such, the label ‘African psychology’ is usually retained for the sake of charting the entangled world that needs to be described, and pointing out to the powerful centre how realities out here, in this corner of the universe in which we live, are actually different from those at the centre.

The limitations of the label ‘African psychology’ are therefore very real, and not easily overcome. And, when they are overcome, they keep returning, even when we would like to be known simply as psychologists.

It can seem comic to suggest that African psychology had white fathers. But it also signals the tragic reality: that African psychology in South Africa gets born out of the fatal intimacy between the colonial and the indigenous. And so while one variety of African psychology might inevitably be colonial by birth, it is the mission of another variety of African psychology to resist it, to decolonise it.

All the same, African psychologists, of all creeds, are condemned to live with and work within this entanglement.

African, in African psychology, is tacit. It is a bracketed word. And, needless to say, African in African psychology contains the term ‘Africa’. African, then, signifies both people and place – it indicates someone or something originating in or connected to a place in Africa.

What kind of critical (or feminist or Marxist or other type of oppositional) psychologists are they who work in Africa, but think of critical psychology as fundamentally opposed to African psychology? This is the question I was confronted with when I re-read an article by three highly regarded African critical psychologists, Desmond Painter, Peace Kiguwa and Werner Bohmke. In 2013, Painter and his colleagues published a wellwritten article, ‘Contexts and continuities of critique: Reflections on the current state of critical psychology in South Africa’ in the journal Annual Review of Critical Psychology. I say ‘re-read’, because I had read the article once before, prior to realising what the problem was that they were not seeing. And, of course, an African-centred consciousness about how a Euroamericancentred world makes us dizzy about our situatedness in Africa takes time to develop.

In their article, Painter, Kiguwa and Bohmke are very critical of African psychology because, among other things, they rightly say, it does not question ‘its status as – and desire to be – psychology’ (Painter et al. 2013: 856). When African critical psychologists like Painter, Kiguwa and Bohmke are critical of African psychology because it does not question its desire to be psychology, they are not being critical of all of African psychology, only of a certain orientation. They are not being critical of a Euroamerican psychological orientation in Africa. They are not being critical of psychological and psychoanalytical African psychology. They are not being critical of critical or structural African psychology. They are being critical of value-based or cultural African psychology. This is what makes them oppose African psychology as a whole to critical psychology, and produce a sometimes curiously Africa-blind critical psychology.

This is what the three scholars say in their article:

Although this is neither always nor fully appreciated, African in African psychology is best when unexpressed. At its strongest point, like a deeply held belief, African in African psychology is the presumed. A way of seeing. A way grounded in, for instance, the sense of hearing, thus listening and speaking and ultimately language – a key subject in cultural debates on the effects of colonialism on African intellectual thought, but also in African psychology when it comes to the question of whether we can fully understand and heal people's emotional and mental pain if we do not understand the language in which they are most at home. A way grounded in the sense of touch and its situated meanings; taste and its literal and figurative denotations and connotations; and smell and its associations, including the smells of food, in the air, about places, of bodies, smells that attract or repel us just outside of our conscious awareness.

This claim is founded on the understanding that there are no value-neutral ways of seeing, feeling or thinking. None is unaffected by power. Certainly, there are no value-barren modes of being, no forms of existence outside the reach of what is desirable, good, right, worthy or valued – and of their opposites. African in African psychology is, therefore, an enunciation. A situated practice. A wordless act involving the whole of your being. It articulates and enacts your position in the world. It is an act that reads, the world looks like this from here.

Here, to be clear, is not just a place. Here is more than simply the place where the body stands looking, the eyes in the head that look out. The self itself is here. Here refers to the self that is inside, and extends (from) the body. You say, telling the other over the phone, I am here. What do you mean? Are you only saying that your body is sitting in a chair in a coffee shop, in a town, in a certain country, in the world? Ultimately you want it to be understood that you, all of your self, is here. Here, then, is the self that looks. We look with the whole of our selves.

Writing a foreword to a seminal text that is being re-published in a different historical moment demands acute sensitivity and a delicate balance. On the one hand, there is the need to be faithful to the authorial voice and preserve the essence of the original text. On the other hand, it is also important to ensure that the text is appropriately framed and located, with perspicacity, for a new generation of readers, even though the authorial voice and textual content originated in a different temporal moment.

This was the task confronting Grahame Hayes, Roshan Cader and myself, as an editorial collective working on the re-publication of N. Chabanyi Manganyi's Being-Black-in-the-World, which was first published in the turbulent political period of 1973. Four primary coordinates propelled and guided an approach to this project. First, many of us as scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences had been re-engaging with Manganyi's work over several years because we believed him to have been an undervalued critical black intellectual and scholar in South Africa. Many of us were committed to having him appropriately located and recognised within fields such as art, literature, psychology, political science, anthropology and so on. Second, since 2015 South Africa's political landscape had seen a groundswell of calls for decolonising universities, curricula, social institutions, notions of science and art, and a recalibration of what constitutes the canon across most disciplines. The synergies between Manganyi's Being-Black-in-the-World and these decolonising calls for an interrogation of the legacies of coloniality on forms of knowledge, subjectivity and power were patently clear, even though Manganyi was much less known as a public intellectual in comparison to the likes of eminent figures such as Stephen Bantu Biko. Third, this particular iteration of the decolonial turn in South Africa had prompted a re-reading of key black intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Biko and, to a different degree, Manganyi. While a number of writers had written about Manganyi's work in the contemporary moment (e.g. Boonzaier and Kessi, 2016), it is Njabulo S. Ndebele's (2018) instructive interpretive essay, ‘“Being-Black-in-the-World” and the Future of “Blackness”’, that reveals the prescient nature of Manganyi's thinking in the 1970s.

There is old ill will towards anything African, no doubt – hostility which seeps into African-centred psychology.

Lack of enthusiasm about the need for African-centred psychology is also not unknown. Nor are disapprobation and denial of the need for such a thing, even while its nature is misconstrued.

The antipathy and apathy towards African psychology coming from psychology students, teachers and professionals stems from old and contemporary feelings and arguments against the idea of Africa and the blackness – signalling darkness, dirt, ugliness, evil – that is said to inhere in Africans. And yet I am constantly startled by the intelligence, the triumph over adversity, the resilience, the beauty and innovation, the music, storytelling and laughter, the deep love and knowledge of the land, the incredible readiness to forgive, as well as the density of life, that exist on a continent some have seen as nothing but an area of darkness.

The need for African-centred psychology arises from, among other things, this fact: decades after the advent of freedom from colonial and apartheid rule, many aspects of the livelihoods, existence and knowledges of the former colonised in African countries continue to be dislocated by the economic, political, social and cultural interests of the US and wealthy Western European nations, specifically the interests of the global capitalist market and the local ruling classes and complicit groups. European and US interests in Africa have a long, devious and rapacious history. Some of these powers are not that hard to identify, but others remain concealed. All of them can be dated to the beginnings of the imperialist and colonial campaigns in Africa in the fifteenth century. The common driving force among all these interests, throughout history, has been the desire to control Africa economically and politically. Everything else follows from and supports this fact.

It is true that even under colonial and apartheid rule there is counter-hegemony. Resistance. Subterfuge. Some of the members of the groups subjected to these powerfully dislocating influences served the interests of their lords. They were, as Freire (2005: 45) put it, ‘sub-oppressors’ – the local bosses who may be even more exploitative than the original masters were. Freedom among some group members did not mean the creation of a new woman and new man but ascension to the level of new dominator.

It is also true that the dislocation could never be perfect. The hegemony of the dominant interest is never totalising. Among conquered women and men we always see spaces of and struggles for psychological, if not political, freedom.

Of particular concern for a psychology that is seized with the question of the dislocation of Africans is the need to be aware that the interests of the profiteering global and local capitalists, not too dissimilar from exploitative colonial and apartheid interests, want to control how the subjugated people think, what they desire, what they know, and what meanings they give to their experiences. Here too, however, the control is not absolute. There are spaces for resistance.

Dr Wahbie Long of the University of Cape Town has said that

It is not incorrect that the interrogation of the definition of African psychology recuperates rows about African identity. Few terms are as generative of heated debate – indeed, of division – in racial and cultural discussions as the term ‘African’ itself. And this makes sense. For many African women and men, not only fluid, non-binary trans and genderqueer Africans, the term ‘African’ itself, distinct from matters of gender and sexuality, can be marked by a sense of loss, a sense of being unmoored, of rupture or rootlessness. This sense is often due to the force of slavocratic, colonial, apartheid, military and corrupt regimes which can cut a people from their history. Africanness can be, for some people, bedevilled by feelings of unanchoredness and insecurity.

A preoccupation of a certain African subject who lives in a very modern city like Cape Town, or a city outside of Africa like Los Angeles, is not necessarily with the attractions of a modern life, such as the latest technology or a holiday in an exotic destination like Bali. Instead, Africa as an object of continuous experience can be this person's principal anxiety. The concern is not with how to be modern in contemporary Africa, but with how to be true, how to be faithful, to the fact of being African while being global in your choices, yearnings, uncertainties and exultations.

This essay is in three parts. The first section deals with the body boundary experiences of a group of hospitalised African paraplegics and normal subjects. This part of the essay is an expanded revised version of a paper published in 1972 (Manganyi, 1972a). The second part of the essay deals with neurotic disorders and problems of psychotherapy (treatment). The third part considers the community mental health approach.

Reflections on the Body

The body image concept was first introduced into the literature mainly as a result of the contribution in the sixteenth century of the French physician-surgeon, Ambroise Pare, who had interested himself in phantom limb phenomena in amputees (Kolb, 1959). Benton (1959) elects Pierre Bonnier as the first worker to develop the concept of an organised perceptual model of the body. Since then, this concept has been defined and developed notably by Gertsmann (1958) and Schilder (1964).

In the most general terms, the body image may be described as an individual's internalised conception, experience and image of his physical self. Much later in the study of the body image, it became apparent that the experience of the body could be studied on the basis of its boundary (peripheral) characteristics (Fisher and Cleveland, 1968a). Workers in this latter mould conceive of the body as having boundary features which may be penetrable or non-penetrable. These boundary features are to be understood as relating to the distancing of stimuli in relation to the body. It was not long before these workers demonstrated the fact that body boundary characteristics were related to certain personality constellations and adjustment strategies.

Of more immediate concern was the recognition by several workers that the body image and its boundary features were extremely sensitive to early socialisation experiences (see, for example, Kolb, 1959; Witkin et al., 1962; Fisher and Cleveland, 1968a). From this observation, it is not a long step to conclude that since socialisation experiences are culturally determined, such differences should account for some measure of difference in the development of body boundary features in different cultural settings. In recognition of this possibility, the present writer became interested in the probable influence of these pathoplastic factors (cultural) in the form assumed by body image disorders in an African group of subjects. This interest was expressed through the formulation of two research hypotheses.

Why should there be an African psychology if African psychology is not necessarily a psychology that studies Africans?

In simple terms, the main stimulus for an African psychology was to get out from under a Euroamerican-centred psychology dominated by the rich Western countries, which have been led since the Second World War by the US. In South Africa, the struggle was against apartheid psychology.

The ultimate goal in searching for an African psychology has been to build a relevant, appropriate, sociopolitically conscious, transformed or decolonised discipline and profession. The search for an African psychology was sometimes explicitly labelled as such, but as often was barely traceable under various discourses such as relevance, appropriateness, or transformation.

Of course, there is no one-to-one correspondence between something like a decolonised psychology and an African psychology. Some African psychological research can be colonialist, racist and sexist. What is needed is not only to centre Africa in psychology, but also to develop an African-centred psychological register that is conceivable as part of a relatively long intellectual history of de-Westernisation, to contextualise, transform, or decolonise psychology and, more generally, knowledge in former colonies and the global south.