Wits University Press

Summary

It is necessary to underline this distinction: not all African psychology is necessarily Africa-centred. This is a key idea. A difference ought to be recognised between those positions in psychology that centre Africa, that take Africa as a place from which one sees, from where the voice projects, and those that apprehend Africa as one among several sites of investigation or as a site of application. This differentiation between psychology that uses Africa as a site of data collection or application and psychology that regards Africa as a place of theory production is as vital as the idea of plurality within the body of work referred to as African psychology; it underscores the idea of African psychology as a set of orientations and not as itself a sub-discipline, or an applied branch of globalised – we will not be wrong to say world-colonising – Western-centric psychology like neuropsychology, health psychology, or human development.

It is not uncommon for African psychologists in their classes and consulting rooms to teach or work with disaffecting notions, models, approaches and texts that misrecognise a myriad of African experiences. Carrying in our brains at least two unequal and often enough antagonistic cultures, many of us offer therapy or teach in an ‘upside-down world’, the words Pal Ahluwalia used when discussing Frantz Fanon's nausea brought on by his confrontation with a white child and its mother on a street in France, which was to bring Fanon the insight that he was hated, and that the world was not what he had been made to think it was: he was not a Frenchman but a ‘body in the third person’ (Ahluwalia 2003: 344). The world of African psychologists is a world in which Africa itself is off-centre, blurry, even pathologised. To speak of an upside-down world replete with misrecognition is to attempt to bring to awareness the position from which we see the world and, of course, from which the world sees us: the terms of our meeting with other humans and animals and the natural environment, our engagement with texts, our transactions with institutions, and our negotiations with the larger world in which we exist. What troubles us, then, is a sense of dislocation, of life lived in multiple time zones, of blurred perspectives, of disrupted flows of consciousness.

Summary

(African-centred) Psychology 101

Welcome to Psychology 101. In this class you will begin the journey towards self-awareness and understanding others psychologically, through an immersion in psychological theory and studies. Most students in South Africa have a vague idea about their own continent and the location of the continent in global psychology. I have designed this course so that you can start to cultivate in yourself what it means to live in Africa and see the world from here. The course will help you to cultivate your consciousness of your own emotions, motivation and thinking. You will learn to analyse your experiences in the world, in your family, among your friends and in your neighbourhood.

While the course covers the common topics of an introductory course in psychology – such as biology, the brain, sensation, perception, research methods in psychology, learning and memory, emotion and motivation, language and cognition, human development, personality, psychological assessment, psychopathology, psychological treatment, social psychology and health psychology – in this class you will be encouraged to critically weigh the topics, studies and theories you will learn about.

Four of the most common questions you will learn to ask are: why was this research considered important; who did the study; how was this conclusion reached; and are there alternative ways to interpret the conclusions? These questions will not only start to develop your ability to think psychologically, but hopefully will also awaken aspects of yourself and the world that you may have taken for granted until now, and contribute towards making you a critical thinker and critical citizen.

The prescribed book for the course is Psychology by Okon Tleare Pa.

Summary

You cannot really understand the development of something like modern African psychology without understanding the centuries-long history and struggles of African people. It is hard – no, near impossible – to fully grasp the meaning of the experiences and behaviour of modern African subjects, and the way they live in cities like Lagos, Kampala and Johannesburg – the informality, hybridity and density of life itself – without studying the painful histories of their lives and how they have constantly struggled to overcome adversity and oppression. African-centred psychology is thus compelled to be a psychological history of the lives of Africans.

Summary

Perhaps the most intractable issue is that of alienation. Alienation compounds the confusion surrounding African psychology.

There are several scholars who have written on the idea of alienation, such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Erich Fromm and Frantz Fanon. But let us begin with some basic definitions. A standard dictionary definition of alienation is ‘the act of estranging or state of estrangement in feeling or affection; loss of mental faculties; the act of transferring ownership of anything; diversion of something to a different purpose’ (Brown 1993: 51).

Alienation exercised Fanon a great deal. In Toward the African Revolution, he states:

Having witnessed the liquidation of its systems of reference, the collapse of its cultural patterns, the native can only recognize with the occupant that ‘God is not on his side’. The oppressor, through the inclusive and frightening character of his authority, manages to impose on the native new ways of seeing, and in particular a pejorative judgment with respect to his original forms of existing. This event, which is commonly designated as alienation, is naturally very important. It is found in the official texts under the name of assimilation. (Fanon 1967: 38; emphasis mine)

Alienation distorts our vision. It infects our existence. It induces us to disapprove of ourselves, to regard our ways of living, now seen as inferior when compared to those of the oppressor, in deprecatory terms.

Someone else who had something to say about alienation was Bantu Stephen Biko. In the trial of members of the South African Students’ Congress and Black People's Convention (organisations designated illegal by the apartheid government) in May 1976, Biko, under cross-examination, made this connection between alienation and what the philosophy of Black Consciousness was meant to achieve with respect to black manhood:

I think basically Black Consciousness refers itself to the black man and to his situation, and I think the black man is subjected to two forces in this country.

Summary

In nearly the same words, I have contended that seen from below, from the perspective of the subjugated, exploited, disenfranchised and excluded, read by victims of slavery, colonialism and contemporary global racism, the history of colonial and apartheid psychology, like the history of all knowledge produced by those uncritical of slavery, colonialism and racism, is another reminder of subjugation, of other forms of violence besides the epistemic kind (Ratele 2017b). The ascendancy of Euroamerican psychology, not too dissimilar to the reign of European and American ideas over Africa, always already expresses and celebrates the destruction of indigenous know-how. Western civilisation freights within it the conquest and dehumanisation of what Western discourse refers to as non-Western societies.

Any attempt to write the history of indigenous African psychology is an exercise in trying to produce a history of subjugated knowledge. Like all histories of victims of legislated dehumanisation, be they of the first people, the indigenous, blacks, women, or queers, such a history will always be entangled history: the history of the dominated is trapped, indeed eclipsed, by that of the dominators. It tries to speak of a past outside history, against the existing, readily available colonial archive – which is to say, a library, a museum, a university – reflective of conquest. It seeks to speak to loss, it is haunted by attempts at rediscovery.

Hence, I have said (Ratele 2017b), African psychology will always have a truncated, highly complex history, and a contested, lost, unacknowledged past. Thus, all of it – the past of Africans’ psychologies, the beginnings of the history of African psychology, its ‘fathers’, and how we apprehend the meaning of African psychology – is wide open to contestation.

Where human psychology is taken, colloquially speaking, as the mental make-up of a person or group, it could be said that all human psychology is African psychology, since the origins of modern human beings can be traced to Africa. Given this, but also because it is desirable to be free to talk to all human beings (and animals, plants, other forms of life, and the earth), we have to say that African psychology cannot be restricted to Africa. African psychology might be psychology from Africa – but it is inevitably for the planet.

Summary

The problem of effective communication in commerce and industry is not unique to the South African situation. Even in countries with fairly homogenous populations and long histories of industrialisation and urbanisation, this problem continues to constitute a thorny issue for industrial psychologists and communication specialists. This fact in itself is a very clear index of the complexity of the problem.

In the case of South Africa, the complexity of the communication process is compounded by our singular history and the existence of an intricate politico-economic structure. This problem cannot but be complex, since South Africa's economy must continue to move in the direction of economic integration (multiracialism) while politically moving more in the direction of multinationalism (separate development). This unhappy marriage between the economy and political or ideological demands is leading to a surfacing of a developing debate. The local press has carried a number of articles relating to whether Africans should become members of organised labour (trade unions) or not. This debate appears to be related to a growing fear of possible future labour unrest. This concern about the adequate representation of African workers was highlighted by an observation attributed to Grobbelaar (1972), who said that about 30 000 Africans had been involved in illegal strikes between 1959 and 1969. The reasons for the increase in the number of illegal strikes are possibly highly complicated. One thing stands out very clearly and it is that this is a very serious indictment of commerce and industry. Here we have the most dramatic expression of a communication problem par excellence.

This essay is an attempt to deal with some aspects of the socio-economic processes of industrialisation and urbanisation as these have affected the African population. This treatment is bound to be sketchy, since particular attention is to be directed at the possible factors which tend to militate against effective communication and to suggest those factors which I consider to promise better organisational hygiene.

Another way of posing the question of the identity of the urban Africans is to ask: Who are the Africans now living in South Africa's urban and industrialised areas? This way of asking the question is for the simple reason that the first question tends to generate more heat than light.

Summary

The black, you might know, was the first superhuman.

The black was the slave – no thought, no emotions, no volition.

The black was property.

A workhorse, the slave appears human but is not.

The black has a different psychology.

The black, a fear-inducing thing, needs to be kept under watch.

Why is the black afraid? The black is not supposed to be afraid. The black makes others afraid.

The black, no feelings.

The black cannot be raped.

The black, rapist.

The black, lazy.

The black is a sex machine.

The black machine.

Superman is not human. Superhuman is subhuman.

Superhuman, subhuman, monstrosities.

Against this black-cloth, how to create a positive psychology of blacks?

Summary

When thinking about African psychology nuance is warranted, and distinctions have to be made with respect to how individuals are oriented towards Africa and psychology. The major distinction to be drawn turns on the centre of gravity of your work as a psychologist in Africa. We need to differentiate between Euroamerican-centrists on the one hand and Africancentrists on the other.

The two categories of African psychologists can also be called scholarly extraverts and scholarly introverts – terms adapted from the work of Paulin Hountondji (1987). These terms do not refer to personality. Scholarly extraverts look to the theories and models and problems arising in the global north to guide their ontological, epistemological, methodological and technical interests. Scholarly introverts look to the experiences and realities, streets and paths in their countries for their ontological, epistemological, methodological and technical interests.

Summary

A basic idea, and yet so consequential: the term ‘African’ in African psychology achieves its highest aim if it has sunk into the depths of the speaking subject's subconscious. I do not have to say, this is my way of seeing the world. Seeing the world from here has become a subconscious habit through a paradoxical process of consciousness-raising.

Rarely are words ever enough; I am painfully aware of this. It is perhaps unsatisfactory to simply tell you that African in African psychology is most powerful when it reaches the level of the taken-for-granted; when we have managed, as individuals or groups, to forget what we were taught to see. People quite often forget who they are, and poetic, enchanting, musical words are seldom all they need. Is it not obvious, then, what is required? We must build shiny modern monuments to the gods of Africancentredness. Create university departments and research centres where developing ‘ways of seeing from Africa’ is a core value and mission. And why not entire universities? Erect graceful temples, great and small, to the idea. Make objects sculptural, visual and tactile in a multitude of forms and shapes which express the idea of a world centred in Africa in so many diverse ways. Produce different tools, tests and techniques. That is what we ought to do.

Summary

The need to understand the existential significance of having Africa at the centre applies to cognitive psychology, to psychopathology, to social psychology, to neuropsychology; it applies to health psychology, political psychology, feminist psychology, positive psychology, psychology of men, work and organisational psychology; it applies to all of psychology.

It has never been clearer why we need to understand the importance of African-centredness, but also how immense the task is of weaning ourselves from Euroamerican-centrism.

To disalienate ourselves we have to come up with not just ideas, but methods, models, behavioural tests, therapies, explanations and technologies in African-centred psychology. We have to find and create ways of conducting work and teaching informed by such a psychology in the African communities or groups of interest to us. We have to contribute towards a framework for being in, engaging with, understanding and writing Africa as the default in psychology teaching, research and theory-making. We have to conscientise ourselves towards being disenchanted with any kind of psychological knowledge and practice that does not centre Africa.

African-centredness in psychology begins and ends with a number of tenets.

It is focused on social relationships – of Africa and Africans to psychology. It is inspired by the interactions and identities it is motivated to study, and by the desire to make these understood by the interactants (persons interacting) and identities in question.

Within the university it aims to raise the social consciousness of students and it is open to learning from students.

In the field of research, an African-centred psychological investigator, beginning with the questions she poses, and having made and explained her findings, would want to empower those who had participated in her studies and would become further educated by the knowledge of the participants.

African-centred psychology would liberate us, the psychologists, from the European and US ‘authorities’ in the discipline and our lives.

Above everything else, African-centred psychology would fully embed itself in the realities of Africa, its histories and traditions, economies and cultures, politics, religions, multiple temporalities and modernities, even though it must always be looking at and responding to the world at large.

Summary

Seven things that, in my framework, African psychology is

not:

Summary

The fundamental subject of The Myth of Sisyphus is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.

Thus declared Camus, the philosopher-novelist of the absurd, in 1955. A little later, he goes on to say:

There is but one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions … comes afterwards. (Camus, 1955: 3)

In more general terms, the fundamental problem posed by Camus may be described as that of suffering. It is suffering in the most general terms which results in ‘nausea’ and a sense of the absurd. Let us, however, return to Camus for a disconcerting dramatisation of the absurdity of human existence:

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. (1955: 19)

This sense of the absurd is what Frankl (1965) describes as the ‘existential vacuum’. When the ‘why’ arises it becomes insistent, almost a compulsive neurosis. The answer to this ‘why’, as Camus and Frankl would tell us, takes various forms ranging from a mild sense of discomfort to psychopathological reactions and sometimes to contemplations of suicide. In this essay, I prefer to leave aside the more general problems of the absurdity of human existence in order that I may pay attention to some specific aspects. Here I wish to refer to that form of human suffering known as illness. It must be during those particularly solitary moments in the sickbed that the ‘why’ articulates itself with the force of a sledgehammer.

Summary

Some of the negative opinions and sentiments about Africancentred psychology are expressed by individuals. Some of the negativity is observable in institutional arrangements, such as what is taught in psychology departments, and who is recruited into professional clinical, counselling, organisational and educational psychology programmes. Ironically, some of the negativity comes from unexpected quarters, like black psychologists.

Summary

Additions to the description of African psychology are called for.

African psychology is not a homogeneous, unchanging terrain. African psychologists disagree about what African psychology is. In fact, some psychologists born and working in Africa do not regard themselves, or are not regarded, as African psychologists. That is really confusing.

Some African psychologists perpetuate knowledge that is prejudiced against Africans. Some African psychologists are conservative, invested in preserving the world in which psychology functions as it is, more or less. And some are radical.

Summary

Is African psychology about Africanising psychology? Some people believe it is. They have every right to their views. However, this is not the African psychology that the disoriented student of psychology in Africa will find meaningful for his or her life. It is not the kind of African psychology that the alienated psychotherapist, white or black, who has encountered only an impoverished lesson, if any at all, about mental life in Africa qua Africa will find readily useful to alleviate the suffering of his or her client.

On the contrary, a tremendous benefit is perceptible in the kind of psychology that does not Africanise American or European psychology but regards itself as an orientation towards the world. Regards itself as one way among several equal ways to understand the life of emotions, mind and behaviours. This African psychology does not adapt (blank) psychology to Africa, where (blank) in this case stands for whichever psychology is meant to be the legitimate version that psychologists and psychology students in Africa are supposed to Africanise, domesticate, modify, or contextualise within the conditions in their countries. This African psychology is a way of doing psychology, a way of seeing the world and Africa from Africa. It is, therefore, a centring of Africans and Africa in the nucleus of psychology. To be at the centre indicates, among several things, a striving to be (an) original, to refuse to be a copy of another, if copying suggests something inferior.

We must note that in an increasingly and more closely interconnected global economy, and with the increasing movement of people across it – without minimising the extent to which such movement is sometimes undertaken at great peril, involving confrontation with nationalistic walls and politics – there is a sense of being copies that we have to embrace. Replication is something that good psychological science strongly encourages, and so should all of psychology in Africa. We are always copying from each other, referencing one another, and not just within science. In everyday life we copy others’ views, reference their ideas, use foreign recipes, learn about other places and people. It is hard, maybe impossible, to be entirely original, without some help from others, without building on something built at an earlier point elsewhere by somebody else.

Summary

Africa, it is true, tends to be a shadowy figure in mainstream global psychology, and for this reason if nothing else I have to be part of a resurgent project to centralise Africa in all areas of psychology in Africa. In my pursuit of this goal, Africa and the many meanings it attracts from foe and friend – some colonial, pejorative, racist, stereotypical, others nativist or mythological, and still others emancipatory, but always dense and elusive – are central figurations in my attempts to understand boys, men and masculinities (in Africa and elsewhere). I have to appreciate that Africa has been tremendously affected by the wars – armed, structural, cultural and symbolic – waged on its ordinary people by European and US imperialists, colonialists, home-grown dictators, army generals and capitalists. I am therefore keen to understand Africa itself as an actor, a dynamic entity on its own, an object of interest, and a place of knowledge-making, that needs thinking about within all studies, teaching and psychotherapy. In my case it means that in thinking about men and women and other genders, I have to think about them from where I am located and where they are positioned in a place in Africa. Psychological African studies as an orientation emerges from the need to use psychological tools to understand subjects as positioned in a world within Africa. As one of the four orientations within African psychology, psychological African studies at the basic level is primarily a transdisciplinary orientation towards Africa, Africans and psychology. In that sense it also has one foot in Western psychology and another in African studies. However, whereas Western psychology is defined as the study of individual behaviour, African studies refers to those studies whose object is Africa. Psychological African studies thus is defined as psychology aimed at integrating the theories, tools and insights of psychology, including tools from psychoanalysis, in order to study Africa (Ratele 2017a).

Psychological African studies includes tools from psychoanalysis. An appreciation of the potential contribution and development of psychological and psychoanalytical African studies begins with an understanding that psychology or psychoanalysis was never one of the core disciplines in African studies.

Summary

What distinguishes the various African psychological orientations shown in Figure 1 (Section 82) from each other is the manner in which two central ideas – Africa and psychology – are apprehended in each of them, although the way in which the two ideas are approached often remains implicit. The most significant element present in all of them, however, is that we, psychologists and students of psychology, are always situated, unconsciously or after deliberation. The four African psychologies can therefore be considered as ways in which actors are positioned in relation to Africa as an object of study, to psychology's place in Africa, to Africa as a place of knowledgemaking, as well as to their own being, social relations, perspectives and expertise. The crucial point is that orientation, or situatedness – that is, the way clinicians, counsellors, teachers of psychology and researchers are positioned or position themselves – has an effect on psychotherapy, counselling, teaching and research.

The different African psychological orientations presented in Figure 1 are not meant to correspond to the established branches or areas of psychology such as critical psychology, cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, political psychology, economic psychology, or indigenous psychology. They are also not meant to correspond to established subdisciplines of psychology such as general, cognitive, developmental, personality, community and social psychology; nor to the categories of professional registration such as clinical, counselling, industrial, educational, research, neuropsychology and forensic psychology; nor to the divisions of the professional associations of psychologists. Instead, these different African psychological orientations are, in my assessment, found within the areas of work, within sub-disciplines, within registration categories, and within the divisions of the professional association. In South Africa, some areas of work, sub-disciplines, registration categories and divisions will evidence more debates on African psychology than others, simply because of the numbers involved.

It is worth noting that African psychology teachers, researchers and psychotherapists can and do move across these different orientations. The boundaries between the four psychologies are permeable. It is likely that individual psychologists will at different points in time orient themselves in one way or another with regard to Africa and psychology.

Summary

It is correct that conscientisation is born out of an awakening to a sense of failure in the face of the continued dominance of offshore models of knowledge and applications within African psychology. I have been a failure. I have been complicit in hawking oppression to black students. How could I have been so blind for so long? How did I think I knew what I was speaking of – please Professor, this way to the podium – when I did not have an authentic voice? It would seem that the struggle to clearly see our situation from an African-centred psychological perspective, the coming to awareness of our failure and collusion with oppression at the very moment we have been promoted and made to feel part of the insiders, comes out of the tussle with our lost selves in an upside-down world.

Summary

Let us return to the question, what does it mean to say African in African psychology ought to be unspoken? What, precisely, is African psychology?

To better appreciate the answers to these questions, let us begin with the second question first.

Confusion abounds within and around the meaning of African psychology. One answer to the question is: African psychology is not American psychology. That much is clear. Another answer: African psychology is not European psychology. That is obvious too.

Beyond that – we have fog and friction.

I know why European and US psychologists – as well as Euroamerican-centred psychologists in Africa and elsewhere outside of Europe and the US – who subscribe to psychology as seen from Euroamerican psychological perspectives might be confused. Because of their own confusion they are usually confusing when they try to say something about African psychology. To believe that African psychology is a special type of psychology is to be confused.

I know why much of what is written by African and African American psychologists who champion African psychology also does not make the concept easy to comprehend. Euroamerican psychology has been very effective in creating a great deal of the confusion among African students, therapists and teachers and the general public, let alone among white European and US students, teachers and therapists. One of the major confusions is that Euroamerican psychology is psychology, and anything else is (blank) psychology – where (blank) stands for any ‘indigenous’, othered and supposedly non-standard psychology which is not real psychology. Euroamerican psychology, apparently, is indigenous to nowhere. It is a body of knowledge with neither origin nor home.

Regarding the first question, African in African psychology is what exists, at the best of times, when African psychology is not on the defensive, a term in brackets: (African) psychology. In other words, when African psychology is psychology. Paradoxically, the best African psychology is therefore knowledge and practice that begin from consciousness-raising about ways of seeing people's lives – from the birth of a baby to the moment of death – through Africa's window; knowledge and practice that, over time, become unconscious. The best African psychological perspective is one that has settled at the unselfconscious level and does not name itself.

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