I will not have the final word. Especially when we consider the future, such as what an introductory textbook on Africancentred psychology would look like – or one on social African psychology, or on neuropsychology from an African-centred perspective, or on African-centred child development, or on any other area of psychology that situates African realities, Africancentred knowledge and knowledge-making, and African lives at the centre – it is obvious that a great many more words have to come, a great deal more work is necessary.

However, in the end I return to the questions that contain the most potential for the work that must be done towards centring Africa in psychology. What does it mean to say African in African psychology is tacit? What precisely does the project of centring Africa and Africans entail? When will the time come when the majority of African students of psychology and African psychologists have overcome the enervating, even retraumatising, inferiority complexes imposed on them in relation to US and European psychology?

To say that African in African psychology should be tacit means we need to constantly remind ourselves that the world makes most sense from our own perspectives – unless we are asked, not compelled or consciously wish, to adopt the Other's perspective. I say it again to remind myself: African in African psychology is silent.

Achieving this involves conscientising yourself towards a place where you feel entitled to your body, your voice, your affective and cognitive life, your perspective. If you have ever felt that your views do not matter, now is a good day to start learning to trust what you see and feel and think.

The project of centring Africa and Africans entails learning to read any psychology text, test or tool as a thing from somewhere. There are no value-neutral textbooks. There is no study or theory that does not assume certain beliefs about the self, others and the world. You cannot, then, read anything well if you read it as from nowhere. This is what Euroamerican psychology has managed to make us forget – that it comes mainly from Western Europe and the US. All knowledge is from somewhere, made by people under specific circumstances, provoked by certain problems that exist around them. And it is only from somewhere that you can read things from somewhere.

Psychology in the non-colloquial sense refers to disciplined knowledge. It is the systematic investigation of the psyche. That is one definition. It is not undisputed. Other psychologists prefer to define psychology as the science of behaviour. That is another definition. Not everyone agrees with it. And still others refer to psychology as the study of experience.

All of these definitions – psyche, behaviour, experience – refer to different phenomena. There is actually no universally agreed-upon definition of psychology.

What might be less controversial is the notion that modern disciplinary psychology is found in texts, transmitted through lectures, conferences, journal articles, books, letters, magazines, and, increasingly, virtually through digital media. In that case, if Lionel Nicholas (2014) is to be believed, African psychology born in South Africa can be traced to the late nineteenth century.

I suspect some of you reading this might have already said to yourselves, ‘Aha, he is essentialising African people. But Africans are heterogeneous.’

I could not agree more. There is no one African psychology that fits all. This is the other factor that has hindered the development of African-centred psychology. There is a view that when I say African psychology, even when I say Africancentred psychology, I refer to a singular, static view of African psychology. On the contrary, African psychology is a set of dynamic orientations. African psychology, the way I see it, is best conceived as ways of seeing, to use John Berger's (1972) notion, that are found within all of psychology, rather than as a sub-discipline of psychology. Perhaps, though, it is imperative to state that we have to find more than one way to get to the point where African-centring knowledges become a given. Perhaps, then, I have to underline that there are several orientations (to which I will return later on) that constitute African psychology.

I have referred to the idea of African psychology as situated knowledge practice; a practice tied to the knowledge maker's or user's situatedness or orientation. What does it mean to say African psychology is situated knowledge and practice? Situated African knowledge and practice is work that is conscious of its birth, history, context and point of view.

Situatedness signals location, position, orientation, or standpoint. To be situated begins with appreciating your biography, sociality, perspective and interpretations. African psychology, seen in this light, is the same thing as situated psychology. But situated psychology is not always African. US psychology is situated psychology, as are British, Chinese, French, Islamic and Latin American psychology. All psychology is situated. However, the fact is that in a world differentiated by economic, military, racial and cultural power, on average those who have better access to such power have little need to situate their knowledge and practice; that is, little need to acknowledge their situatedness.

What is called African psychology is not a separate body of knowledge but a way to situate your work and yourself. But people situate themselves in different ways in any field of knowledge and practice. As situated practice and knowledge, African psychology is not one single thing but a polyvocal and dynamic enterprise. It is made up of different voices. It is not static. In that way, African psychology is composed of different orientations. And how you are situated in or oriented to the world frames the research questions you ask; presents the world to you from a certain perspective and occludes other possibilities; influences your therapeutic goals, success and failures; determines what you teach and what you leave out.

They are not many fathers who teach their children that they are African, and what that fully entails; that is to say, teach the child directly about what living as an African is, or is not, and what it can be. It is true, though, that some of them are raised hearing from adults around them what the Sesotho word botho means – that is, what being human entails, as they learn how to behave towards others, how to think of themselves as members of a community of individuals who respect and take care of each other – and what it is not. But how many parents do actually teach their children directly about being African? For that matter, who has received direct and comprehensive instruction in what it means to be black? Not many, not directly, and not in any classroom in the course of their basic schooling or university education.

The first lesson involved in teaching African psychology is thus to teach Africa. Perhaps all courses about African psychology are essentially directed at learning and teaching about Africa in the world. The world from Africa. And yet, once again, the best of African psychology courses are those that can manage to teach Africa and being African in the world well, without mentioning the words ‘Africa’ and ‘African’.

I suspect that not many normal white parents, in Africa, America, Europe or elsewhere, teach their children that they are white. By normal, I mean those individuals who do not consider themselves racist. I do not suppose they tell their children to enjoy their white privilege.

This is what puts me in mind to ask, in the context of working to realise African-centred psychology: what do we teach the young and each other about being African in today's world? How can we not teach Africa in psychology, in today's world? Given Africa's economic position relative to North America, Western Europe, Australia and China, the assumption I make is that it is a virtuous thing to teach Africa, to learn about being African in the world, so as to withstand the arrows of global apartheid and racism, and the subtle and overt valuing of whiteness or the privileges that come with a US or EU passport when compared to African ones.

In May 1970 Noel Chabani Manganyi published a paper on hysteria among mainly African women in the South African Medical Journal (Manganyi 1970). In the same year he completed a doctorate in psychology at the University of South Africa (Manganyi 2013: 281). Depending on whether you accept or reject the idea of white men like Smuts and Wilcocks in Africa as African (taking into account that some of them may have been race supremacists and anti-black), Manganyi could be seen as the rightful father of African psychology, and the history of African psychology as beginning circa 1970. Knowledge produced by black scholars in psychology and other disciplines is indispensable. A need to draw out the ties and crossings between African psychology and black studies (as well as other fields such as African studies and cultural studies) also exists. But there is, in my estimation, a perennial danger of African psychology being conflated with psychology by black scholars. Even worse, African psychology can be relegated to studies on black people by black psychologists. Psychology by black scholars is linked, but not identical, to African psychology. African psychology is a much broader enterprise. Above all, African psychology is not a discipline.

Since Manganyi began his work, there have emerged a number of radical and conservative black scholars in psychology. Black psychology students and psychologists have called for a relevant, appropriate, non-Euroamericancentred psychology for South Africa. In recent times, the call has become more insistent, and the debates more intense. It is true that these debates have also been characterised by prejudice, knee-jerk reactions, nastiness and apparent frustration. Despite that, the debates about African psychology, along with the demands for decolonisation and free education for university students, and the establishment of the Forum for African Psychology as a formal division of the Psychological Society of South Africa, have, as a call for papers in Psychology in Society stated, ‘reignited some of the old hopes and frustrations about psychology’ (Psychology in Society 2016: 1). The intensifying call for a transformed, decolonised, or African psychology ought not to be ignored. In my assessment that is what prevails: it is as if there is a hope that this demand for African psychology will go away, later if not sooner.

This is indeed an afterthought. My thoughts had actually wandered off the subject matter of the essays which I had just completed, and I had started working in my study on the problem of identity. While reflecting on this difficult subject, I remembered that a friend had recounted how he had been shocked by the contents of a recent publication. I also remembered that he had been indignant and amazed that such ideas could still find their way into academic print. I know him to be a very balanced person who is never overhasty with opinions. Since I had just been working on some aspects of the African experience, my curiosity was naturally aroused by this bit of information.

With unusual curiosity, I instituted an immediate search for ‘Tyd en Neurose by die Bantoe’, translated in the summary as ‘The Bantu, Time and Neuroses’ (Engelbrecht, 1972). For the benefit of those readers who may be unable to consult the original, I would like to quote two paragraphs from the English summary which represent the main theses of the paper. Prof. Engelbrecht writes as follows:

I would like to be arrogant enough to take this celebrity of philosophy at the University of the North to task for some of his unfounded claims.

In my thinking, a number of routes into African psychology exist. One way leads towards the idea of African psychology restricted to Africans. Another begins with but extends beyond Africa and Africans.

The fundamental question posed about Africa and psychology is what frames the meaning and horizon of African psychology. Granted that this is an oversimplification, there are two broad ways to ask questions about African psychology.

The first line of questions focuses on actors, subjects and identities – who is the student, teacher, author, reader, study subject, therapist, or client? In this particular case we might ask the question: is African psychology a psychology that focuses on Africans? Some researchers, teachers and therapists may be inclined towards an African psychology of this kind. However, such an approach could also limit the potential and future of African psychology as a global enterprise. That is to say, when such identity-related questions are used to frame African psychology, African psychology often appears as an esoteric branch of psychology, perhaps even an area of work outside of psychology. It is on the basis of such identitarian questions that African psychology gets to be defined as studies and therapies (of X, whatever X is) on or for (and sometimes, although slightly different, by) Africans. All the same, although there are researchers, teachers and therapists who may prefer African psychology thus defined, it is but one way to conceive of the work.

The second line of questions concerns standpoints, methods and applications – what the topics of interest are, how to approach them, and what interpretations can be derived from the data. From this angle we might ask: how might we undertake research or see therapeutic work from an African psychological perspective? This places African psychology within psychology, even if in an oppositional stance towards the mainstream. Such a question seems to lead towards a more variegated African psychology. The definition suggested by these questions is this: African psychology refers to ways of situating oneself in the field of psychology in relation to and from Africa.

Conscientisation is a fundamental concept in emancipatory African-centred interventions and self-education against Euroamerican-centred psychology. It is a concept closely associated with Freire. Conscientisation, he says, is the means via which ‘people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects’ (2005: 160). Having become critically aware of being together with others ‘in a situation’, they will begin the struggle towards humanisation (2005: 109, 119). As an educational approach, it has been absorbed into diverse registers of social activism (including political consciousness-raising). It influenced the strategies of anti-colonial and liberation movements such as the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale, the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique and the Zimbabwe African National Union; its principles and methods can be identified in the ideas of individual political leaders like Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Lopes da Costa Cabral and Oliver Reginald Tambo.

With respect to the struggles to free South Africa from white oppressive rule, conscientising the people through various media, such as radio programmes and reading materials, was one of the strategies for gaining the support of the masses that the African National Congress, the Pan African Congress of Azania and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa employed.

Conscientisation can and must be pursued in lecture rooms, in reading groups and through books, if African- centred psychology is to become an ordinary fact. Furthermore, in this age of information, and given the reach of the internet, consciousness-raising work relating to African psychology must also make use of media such as radio, newspapers, television, internet-based tools, apps and all other evolving forms of digital communication.

Conscientisation brings home to you your own alienated expertise and experiences. An awareness of your alienation – including the linguistic alienation of your expertise as well as your experiential alienation – leads to the consciousness that for those psychologists who identify with Africa, a sense of failure will probably persist until there is not only a psychology in Africa, but also a complex and meaningful Africa within the annals and halls of psychology.

There is an undeniable desire for African-centred psychology in Africa, certainly in South Africa. This is the desire to return to and learn to appreciate the history of the work done by African scholars on the continent and in the diaspora. It's a desire stimulated by feelings and perceptions of alienated expertise. It arises from the question, what does it mean to be a highly qualified professional educational, clinical, child, social, counselling, developmental, cognitive, cultural, or any other kind of psychologist you can think of, to be invited to conferences around the world to share your expertise, when in your gut you feel that yours is a body out of place, an impostor, that you are an alien not entitled to be there?

An alienated expert is a mimic. Alienated expertise means the expert is not the originator of the knowledge he or she professes.

The implication of all this is that there is an imperative for you to build – in psychology, in your lecture rooms and departments, in your consulting rooms, in your books and articles and films, in your activism and psychological art, and in the spaces in which you work and interact – a more welcoming home. You are compelled, unless you want to remain enslaved by Euroamerican ideas, to liberate your mind and work and practices from the colonial and apartheid master's gaze. To build an authentic African psychology. To strengthen African-centred psychology coming out of African countries, by building on the history of African thought (as well as non-African thought which challenges the injustice ferried around the world as part of the global hegemony of Euroamerican-centrism).

It took my leaving teaching in a university psychology department, eleven years after I had walked into a university as a young lecturer, to arrive at this simple insight: to understand yourself as a(n) (Africa-centring) psychologist, you are compelled to work yourself towards a position where Africa is bred-in-the-bone. It can take time, in the face of received hegemonic psychology. Perhaps I am a slow learner. In total I had had the experience of nearly two decades within universities before I arrived at the full consciousness of what it means to do African-centred psychology. What it means for me to unselfconsciously situate my practice as an African at the centre of global psychology.

The received Euroamerican psychology that is taught in African universities was not meant to serve the interests of the majority of the people. It was an offshore, or extraverted, body of knowledge, largely serving the interests of the foreign or local dominant group. The dominance of an offshore model of psychology may be one reason why we have little concerning Africa in psychology. This is the case even though we have large psychology classes, numerous conferences, thriving therapy practices and well-paid psychology professors in universities in countries like South Africa. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013: 5) has argued that

Take these two definitions of psychology offered in textbooks. One book was published in the US and the other in South Africa. Looking only at definitions does not give a full picture of the issue, but my intention is to show, rather than tell, why there is a need to situate Africa at the centre of global psychology, why Africa has to be consciously unstated in African psychology, and how best to articulate African psychology. In addition, I think that this exercise enables us to see what African-centred psychology is and what it is not.

In his general introductory US textbook, Psychology, John W. Santrock gives this definition: ‘psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental process’ (2000: 5). This definition assumes that psychology, taken as a science like physics, is the same everywhere. But psychology is not like physics. Psychology is a social science. Psychology centres the experiences of individuals and groups in the US. I have no objection to this. But let Santrock's book on a US-centric psychology, like many other US textbooks, not be projected as universal psychology. The US is the invisible term in front of Psychology.

In Introduction to Psychology, which he also edited, Lionel Nicholas (2003a) wrote the first chapter. In the chapter he states: ‘While the many definitions of psychology may have varying emphases, all agree that psychology is the scientific study of behaviour’ (2003a: 2). This edited textbook, published in South Africa and composed of sixteen chapters, covers the usual major topics of psychology written by authors based in South African institutions: developmental psychology, perception, learning, personality, intelligence, health psychology, and so on (Nicholas 2003b). Nicholas's definition also presupposes that psychology, as the scientific investigation of behaviour, is the same whether you are in South Africa or the American South.

A very interesting feature of the two definitions is their similarity. Santrock and Nicholas are partly in agreement about what psychology studies (behaviour and mental processes) and how it studies its object (scientifically). I wonder, though, if there are any differences between some behaviours and mental processes among South Africans and among US Americans? If there are no differences, of course we do not need Africancentred psychology. Euroamerican-centred psychology is all we need.

When alienation is the problem, what is the solution? Conscientisation. Self-awareness. Develop your consciousness. Develop your own voice.

We have touched on some terms already. Here are other key terms of which to take note, with brief descriptions:

Western/Euroamerican psychology: Western or Euroamerican psychology is all psychology concerning Europe and the US. Euroamerican-oriented psychology is found not only in the US and European countries but all over the world, including Africa. It dominates Africa and the rest of the world. Euroamerican psychology in Africa is also what at times I refer to as psychology-in-Africa (which is to be understood as different from psychology for Africa) in my framework of four orientations in African psychology presented in section 82. Euroamerican psychology puts the experiences of mainly white, Western European and US, middle- to upper-class, usually heterosexual men and women, but also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexed (LGBTQI) Westerners, at the centre of its world. Even when it is exported to Africa, Western-centred psychology ultimately serves the economic, political and cultural ends of Europe and the US. In the most general terms, mainstream Euroamerican psychology tends to assume (and, based on this assumption, to pose questions, design studies, make interpretations, offer psychotherapies and prescribe psycho-pharmacological medication that support the assumption) that life experiences have to be better and more satisfying in the capitals of Western Europe and America for a certain economic class of people. Conversely, people in their right mind – meaning psychologically healthy – cannot really have a full, meaningful and satisfying life in Africa or other parts of the world, certainly not if they are money-poor (in contrast to spiritually poor, for example) and do not subscribe to assumptions underpinning mainstream Euroamerican psychology. ‘Euroamerican psychological research has for long served as a rationalising bulwark,’ the great Somali psychologist Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan (1980: 20) observed, ‘stifling consciousness as well as conscience regarding the ruthless exploitation of the African.’

African psychology: There are some people, such as my colleagues at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) – and it is worth mentioning here Nhlanhla Mkhize and Augustine Nwoye – who apparently hold the view that African psychology is a field in psychology (see Mkhize 2004; Nwoye 2015). More specifically, they seem to consider African psychology as a branch of psychology, similar to how psychologists usually think of developmental psychology, neuropsychology, or social psychology.

In ‘What is African psychology the psychology of?’ Augustine Nwoye (2015) asks several questions, including the title question, which could be seen as mischievous, as they appear to dismiss decades of substantial work by black scholars in the US on the same question, as well as their efforts to develop African psychology. These questions include:

However, what Nwoye may also be understood to be arguing is that the raison d’être, status and delineation of African psychology for and within African countries should be considered.

Does African psychology refer to studies conducted and healing techniques practised on Africans? Not necessarily. African psychology can study non-Africans. We are obligated to ensure that it does so. It will never be enough to stop at Africans, if it is Euroamerican psychology that shapes how we think about Africa and the world. The world has to be remade in our image, to make space for all of us, if we are to feel at home wherever we might be.

It is true that you come across some academics and practitioners who mistakenly reduce African psychology to a psychology that studies only Africans. However, a vast literature indicates that African psychology is – and must be – the study of all forms of behaviours and relationships, including behaviours of and relationships between non-Africans and Africans, as well as between humans and animals.

An even more crucial point that bears repeating: all of psychology done in and for Africa, by and about Africans, by Africans and non-Africans (working on questions related to Africa and Africans) is African psychology.

To seek to entrench African-centred psychology is a quest to better locate Africa and Africans in knowledge. To try to locate Africans better means to situate them in less stereo-typical ways, to produce ideas that are disalienating for a meaningful life in Africa. ‘Disalienating ideas’ refers to those ideas whose underlying, if not always articulated, object is to situate Africa as a place of knowledge-making for the world and to locate Africans as theory makers, not only data creators. This object encompasses investigation of the very question of what knowledge itself is, as well as of its dissemination – the building of publics for the knowledge we create as researchers, teachers, students, professionals, policymakers, or activists. The primary question that we must deal with in African-centred knowledge is therefore always about the location of knowledge and being, as well as of power, after the facts of colonialism, slavery and apartheid.

The future of African-centred psychology does not lie in repeating the demand for it to exist alongside Euroamericancentred psychology. It lies in doing many more research studies centring Africa. Large as well as in-depth studies. Theoretical work that situates itself within cultures and institutions in Africa while generating explanations that have global meaning. It lies in unapologetically situating the fact of being in Africa in our lecture rooms, in university policies, in professional networks and associations. In understanding the self as deeply ‘affected’ by being of Africa and situated in a place in Africa. All this we have to do if we are to extricate ourselves from the enduring effects of colonial, slavocratic and apartheid systems of power, feeling, thought and being.

There are, however, three problems that confront psychologists and students in trying to see the world, their work and themselves from an African centre.

The first problem we face as psychologists or students in trying to think, teach, heal, learn, feel, or work while keeping Africa at the centre of the world is precisely how colonialism comes to reshape knowledge about what it means to be human. As part of the colonial and apartheid intellectual arsenal, psychology was weaponised, along with other sciences, towards the making of a certain understanding of Africans, who came to be thought of as black, as a different species of humans.