Wits University Press

Summary

Some people have said that African psychology was developed by Africans in America. I first came across this notion, stated in this manner, in the ‘Foreword’ to the book Handbook of African American Psychology edited by H.A. Neville, B.M. Tynes and S.O. Utsey (see Cross 2009). The Foreword was written by the African American social psychologist William E. Cross Jr. Cross is known for having developed the psychological nigrescence model of black racial/ethnic identity development. The Cross model of the process of becoming black proposed that the development of black racial/ethnic identity passes through a number of stages in a movement from negative, white normative standards to positive, authentic self-perceptions, namely: pre-encounter, encounter, immersion-emersion, internalisation and internalisation/commitment (Cross 1978; Parham 1989).

About African psychology, Cross has suggested that as a more or less coherent body of knowledge, it has emerged to address the aim of understanding the influences, struggles, conditions, costs and achievements of people of African descent in the US. From this perspective, African psychology arose out of efforts by black American psychologists not only to recognise and produce psychological knowledge that differed from white American psychology, but also – and primarily – to oppose the racist assumptions, theories and research conclusions about black behaviour, feelings and thoughts that are found in this psychology. According to Cross, African psychology was thus not an invention of African psychologists on the continent of Africa, but rather a psychology developed in America by black American psychologists. Underlining this point, he defines African psychology thus:

[It is] an invention, a social construction hammered out by Black intellectuals in the Americas – especially the United States. It is a formulation derived from the imagination of Blacks living outside Africa – descendants of slaves lacking direct contact with Africa for over 100 years – who are looking ‘back’ to Africa for solutions to predicaments, problems, and dilemmas enveloping Blacks throughout the Diaspora and especially the United States. (Cross 2009: xi)

I swallowed it whole. I went on to repeat it. It is not always true, though.

There is much I agree with in these sentiments about what African psychology includes. However, African psychology was not invented by black Americans, however much I admire black American psychologists like Cross, Na'im Akbar, Joseph Baldwin, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, Asa Hilliard, Harriette Pipes MacAdoo, Linda Meyers, Wade Nobles, Thomas Parham and many others.

Summary

Take any branch of psychology – let's say, human development. As with all of psychology, the foundational problem in the psychology of human development is that of an absent, nebulous and dark Africa, and of strange or stereotypical Africans. The problem reaches far beyond developmental psychology, beyond psychology actually.

Given the realisation that the problem of so-called dark Africa or a nebulous Africa in psychology extends beyond the branch of psychology of human development, let us nevertheless ask a few questions of developmental psychology. These secondary questions are not intended to point an accusatory finger at those psychologists who identify as developmental psychologists. If there is any accusation whatsoever, it is directed to ourselves, and concerns what we have ignored or accepted to make ourselves comfortable within the university and professional establishment, content to reproduce the master's grand psychological narrative.

Here, then, are two paradigmatic questions that we have to keep in mind when educating ourselves, or others, into an African-centred orientation. The first question, directed at the most general level of our alienation, is why we stick with developmental psychology, despite its birth in or domination by US and Western European psychology, but more importantly why we continue to use its models, when we can see that the socioeconomic conditions under which children develop in many cultures in Africa make many of the models of child development in Euroamerican developmental psychology suspect, sometimes injurious. Do we really believe that the responses of an American white middle-class male undergraduate (a favourite subject in psychology research in the US) to questions about human development are transferable to males (and females) in places in Africa, that they are adequate for an understanding of psychological development in Africa? If there is a suspicion that there are gaps in our knowledge, or that there is a mismatch between the Euroamerican developmental psychology taught in university departments in Africa and people's actual development, why have we not been conscientised into or energetic in creating a developmental psychology with Africa at the centre?

Just in case there is any confusion about my question, let me say clearly that Euroamerican developmental psychology is exactly that: it centres European and US realities.

Summary

You could say, though, that the history of the discipline of psychology is not one of manuscripts, but of university departments, with their lecturers and students. In this light, where the history of psychology is viewed as entailing the establishment of a separate university department, African psychology begins at Stellenbosch University in 1917 with the setting up of the first independent psychology department on the continent.

Having graduated with a PhD with the title ‘Zur Erkenntnistheorie Hegels in der Phänomenologie des Geistes’ from the University of Berlin in the same year, Reymond (sic) William Wilcocks was appointed as the first head of this department.

Could Wilcocks be regarded as the real father of African psychology?

It depends on, among other things, whether someone like Wilcocks considered what he did to be African psychology. And then there is also the question of how he was considered by those who worked with him, those whom he taught, and those who read about him today. No answer is likely to go unchallenged. Again I contend that Wilcocks did indeed do African psychology, because of the mere fact that he lived in and was doing psychology in Africa. As to what kind of African psychology he did, that is a more interesting question.

Regardless, in Wilcocks's studies on Hegel in Berlin we find yet another sign of the reach of the psychology practised by those who live in Africa. It is a psychology that was influenced by German philosophy, and the influence of European epistemologies, values and interests on it persists today. What lies in the future of psychology should be the mutually beneficial influence of African-centred knowledges on European universities and other knowledge institutions.

Summary

The unstated question is: why is there a need to use the adjective African psychology instead of simply taking all psychology done in Africa on Africans and non-Africans as psychology, period? What some scholars seek to do with the term ‘African’ is to distinguish between different ways of thinking about Africa, being African, and psychology. Arising out of this quest, again usually implied rather than explicitly stated, are to be found attempts to differentiate between psychology that identifies with or empathetically centres Africa, and a neutral psychology that approaches Africa as one object among others. As such, while all psychology that is taught, studied, published and applied in South Africa, just as in other African countries, is of course African psychology, the effort has been to surface psychology teaching, research and applications that consciously identify themselves with Africa. The latter is what is sometimes referred to as African-centred/Afrocentric psychology. Wade Nobles has this to say about this distinction:

We, therefore, should not be just talking about psychology in Africa. To simply bring Western psychology to Africa is to be complicit in the mental brainwashing and psychic terrorism … of Africa and the adoption of the very tool and theories that have been used to demean, defame, debilitate, and damage us. In effect to merely advance Western psychology into Africa would be akin to uncritically drinking poison as if it were medicine to heal and revive ourselves. (2015: 402–403)

Even when the distinction has been made clear, the questions we pose about Africa, Africans, the West and psychology will tend to close down or open up how we think of an African psychology. Thus it is necessary to recognise that the term ‘African psychology’ is contingent, can have multiple meanings, and, in countries like South Africa, is overladen with the political history of colonialism and apartheid racism. The term ‘African psychology’ will therefore have to be always contingently embraced by students, teachers, researchers and therapists, even as psychological work from different countries of Africa remains in need of strengthening – in some countries, like The Gambia and Equatorial Guinea for instance, considerably more so than in others. Strengthening African psychology is a gargantuan task.

Summary

Even though it has become clear to me what is to be gained from building an African-centred psychology, it bears repeating: it is curious that a great many psychologists in Africa have not fully recognised the need to do so. Could I be wrong, and there is nothing to be gained from freeing ourselves from the domination of Euroamerican psychology in Africa? If there is a world to be gained from disalienation, from psychological freedom from colonial, white, Euroamerican-centralising psychology, what to make of this curious state of affairs in which many of us have got lost? How else can we explain a situation in which people seem satisfied with their own alienation?

Summary

A question I am sometimes asked is: if we are in Africa, why do we need to build an African psychology (meaning an African-centred psychology)?

It is true that, since colonisation, Africa has become a contradiction. Africa's future – and past – have become entangled with Europe's interests, regardless of whether or not Africans wanted this inconvenient marriage. One example: most African economies trade more with Europe (and then, from a certain moment in history, with the US, and now increasingly with China) than with each other. Another example: most African countries do not have an indigenous language as their only official language.

I have given an answer to this question of why there is a need to build an African psychology. It bears repeating, and if nothing else, this is what is at stake: only a situated understanding can offer an answer to the problems of life as it is actually lived. African psychology is situated psychology. African in African psychology ought to be unspoken, but, because of the hegemony of Euroamerican psychology (even) in Africa, we are forced to say, this is an African-centred perspective on the psychology of (say) leadership, of learning, of children, of cognition, when what we mean is that this is leadership from the perspective of psychology in this situation.

In other words, African psychology is psychology

Summary

Freedom, even as apparently straightforward a type as political freedom, is not that simple to grasp. Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Does political freedom simply mean the release from oppression, to vote, stand for office, freely participate in politics? Or does it always signal and require other types of freedoms? Can we have political freedom when we do not have freedom to express ourselves, to associate freely, where the media is inhibited? What does it mean to be politically free but without a decent job? When you sometimes go hungry? In a starkly economically or sexually unequal society? How much sense does it make to say that the group to which you belong – say, men as a group, or whites, or heterosexuals – is free when other groups are oppressed by, or on behalf of, your group? These questions are vital for anyone interested in political African psychology; in teaching about political emancipation; in tracing the history of African freedom struggles; in looking at the future of freedom. In a book about looking at the world from a certain place in that world, though, we can limit ourselves to considering concrete acts of freedom to make freedom apprehensible. Freedom from the overt or subtle coercion to see the environment, self, and others in a way that privileges a white, male, Euroamerican gaze is cardinal. The individual's autonomy to look is a sine qua non of political freedom. And, absolutely, freedom always calls for other rights.

It is axiomatic that white racism seeks to turn black people into inferior humans. It wants to render them as servants. It criminalises them. It infantilises. Or, when it wants to be charitable, it stereotypes them as pitiable creatures.

The same holds for sexism: its goal is to turn women into objects, into bodies, into childlike beings who look up to men, or into men's helpers. The effect, in all cases, is to subordinate them to men.

The same is also true of how the rich look upon those who are poor. The poor are lazy. They are delinquents. They are pathological, harbouring mental and medical diseases. They have to be felt sorry for.

Summary

The genealogy of African psychology can only be contested. The question of this genealogy, which is a question of history, triggers these other questions: who can be part of it? What is it for? Who is it for? But above all, asking about progenitors cues the issue of definition. In relation to knowledge, lineage instantiates authority, and the problematic of what kind of psychology flows from such origins. As such, the spectre of definition cannot but haunt the history, and therefore the future, of African psychology.

Summary

Ten things you ought to know about African-centred psychology:

Summary

A thesis advanced here is that Smuts and Wilcocks are part of the history of African psychology. Depending on the test of paternity, each can lay claim to fathering modern African psychology.

The idea of white males as fathers of African psychology, illegitimate or otherwise, is not one that is going to be readily accepted by some psychologists. Yet both men were citizens of an African country, after all.

Ranged against that claim is the recognition that the two men were of European origin, and that the indigenous Africans were oppressed, their knowledge discounted.

Summary

What is the problem to which such a situated psychology responds? Let us call it the problem of disorientation. Or of inferiority complex. Of an upside-down world, to borrow Pal Ahluwalia's (2003: 343–345) words. Confusion. Alienation. A sense that life is always happening elsewhere.

This is the problem of the domination of a psychology made in America or Western Europe over Africa and Africans – let us simply call this psychology, whenever we can, Euroamerican or Western psychology. It is the problem of a psychology practised in Africa that has very little to say about the causes of mental illness, social pathologies, violence in its bodily, institutional, cultural, governmental, economic and political forms. It is that curious feeling you have, as an African, that the psychological explanations for what is happening to you are to be found elsewhere, not around you or in yourself. In fact, that the questions with which psychologists and psychology students ought to occupy themselves are not to be found in themselves, their families, their schools, in the relationships they have or do not have, in their neighbourhoods and workplaces, in the economies of their countries or their politics. The feeling that the questions themselves, and not only the answers, lie somewhere across the seas. And that the theories and models presented in books and journal articles published in the US and Western Europe have the solutions to that disorientation, inferiority complex, sense of living in an upside-down world, confusion, alienation – rather than being their causes.

The problem to which such a situated psychology responds, then, is the problem of living well psychologically, culturally, and not just physically, but also of dying well (in contrast to dying from preventable causes like hunger, HIV/Aids, interpersonal violence, suicide, or transport-related accidents which kill so many people in African countries).

Summary

Psychology: A proposal for an introductory textbook by Okon Tleare Pa

Psychology by Okon Tleare Pa will herald a new way of introducing students to the field of psychology. In contrast to books in which Africa is usually non-existent, in this book Africa will be placed at the centre, and you as the student in an African university will also be at the centre. The textbook will be the first of its kind to induct students into the habit of reading psychological research and explanations from an Africa-centred perspective, without presenting Africa as something outside global psychology. While immersing students in psychological theory and studies, the book will teach students how to understand themselves psychologically, not as generic individuals but as persons living in Africa. Students will begin to appreciate their own perspectives on their own and other people's behaviour, thought, emotions and motivation. The book will, of course, cover all the topics covered in most introductory textbooks, but its defining aspect will be how the following topics are introduced and interpreted to students:

Introduction

History of Psychology

Research Methods

Biology and Brain

Sensation and Perception

Consciousness

Learning

Memory

Emotion and Motivation

Language

Cognition

Intelligence

Child, Adolescent and Adult Development

Personality

Psychological Assessment

Psychopathology

Psychological Treatment

Social Psychology

Health Psychology

(What you do not see here is that Africa and its derivatives are the unwritten terms next to each topic: History of Psychology and Africa, African-Centred Perspectives on Consciousness, Personality in African Contexts, African-Centred Psychological Treatment, etcetera.)

Summary

I started teaching at a university in late 1996. After years of frustration whose source was sometimes plain but at other times obscured, but a not altogether unhappy decade or so of teaching psychology, I turned away from the discipline. It would be close to a decade later that I finally came to realise fully what has been the real and constant source of frustration – not just my own frustration with the discipline and how it is organised and taught, but the frustration of many students who sit in psychology classes in African universities.

To paraphrase the famous line which is often erroneously attributed to Bill Clinton, the former president of the US: it's power, stupid.

As in any other profession, to be licensed or otherwise recognised as a psychologist is to be legitimated as knowledgeable. Knowledge, in this case, is very clearly the power to define oneself and the world. This is not an original insight.

Psychology is obviously about power – the power to speak as an expert about people's experience and behaviour. This may seem like an original thought, but I have more than a hunch that quite a few anti-establishment, radical and critically minded psychologists have said it already.

Even though it purports to deal with individual behaviour, psychology as it is practised is usually in agreement with the existing structures of power. It counsels people to adapt to their conditions. It teaches students to want to achieve upward mobility within the existing capitalist society.

African-centred psychology is therefore a position taken against the oppressive power of Euroamerican psychology. It is a call to situate Africa at the centre, and not, as is the case now, on the periphery of global psychology. It is an attitude that impels you to place yourself and your world as an African at the centre, to judge the fitness of any theory, approach, or model, every source, technique, or finding, from the perspective of life and time – in a context of severely disrupted histories and multiple temporalities – in Africa. Recognition of yourself as an African-centred psychologist is the beginning of the process of disalienation.

Summary

The place from which we come shapes our experience and the self. When the place has been severely disturbed and for a prolonged period, when our experiences of our place and the self in the world have been violently and extensively interrupted, we may get fixated with the place, with its past or future. We may want, for instance, to return so that we can repair the place, and in so doing restitch our experiences and the self. We may desire to go back to make the past better, however irrational the idea of repairing the past appears. We become obsessed with the future of the past, with tradition in the present. Many places in Africa are marked by repeated, sometimes continuous, violent interruptions of experiences and identities. Some Africans who live with these interruptions of experience, with the kind of historical trauma capable of reconfiguring identity, can and do become haunted by the trauma of the past. The past is too much in the present. The question of the past of Africa within modern life thus cannot but be drawn into debates on African knowledge broadly and African psychology more specifically. Yet, while the questions related to what is African about African psychology are almost ineluctable, it would be incorrect to claim that African psychology has failed because it seems to be obsessed with the issues of who is African or with the past. That is to say, that African psychology cannot help us survive modern life, that it is anti-modern (or at best not modern enough). As I have said, African psychology has been around since the nineteenth century and is arguably thriving.

What troubles African psychology, and might make us see failure where there is a complicated history but also wellestablished African psychology departments, is of course imbricated with the fixation with what it means to be African, and yet it is surely also an aftermath of the lack of clarity regarding what African psychology is. The question of definition is unavoidable. It trips up many. Definitional issues are never fully resolved. African is irretrievably marked by coloniality, an immersive phenomenon. Europe is still in Africa. African psychology exemplifies the profound entanglement of colonial conquest.

Summary

Today, there may be a constitutional right to education in many countries in Africa. Throughout history, across Africa and in other parts of the world, men and women in church groups, political organisations, social movements, or as individuals have agitated for education. This right to education is absolutely important to treasure, especially given that there are still countries where education is not a right, or where, even though it is a right, obvious structural barriers exist that prevent some groups from gaining access to it. If you are poor, for instance, what you get may or may not be what you need or want. A great deal of what you get does not amount to much when it comes to learning how to live with self-esteem, pride, love, purpose and meaning. Poverty ought not to undermine the right to education, but where education is commoditised it does limit your educational choices as far as quality is concerned.

To overcome the effects of a dehumanising history, not merely in order to be rich but to learn to live a life full of significance, even if your parents were poor and unschooled – that's exactly what you won't get from the right to education if your teachers don't care for the whole of you as a person. You are more than just your brain or your body.

Even though I acknowledge the imperative of affirming education as a legal human right, I am struck by the fact that there is rarely ever an ethical obligation for those who look after the education of the young to ascertain that they are well taught. To be taught well can mean many things. To someone like me, keeping the notion of African-centredness in mind, it means that African children and young people, and all others who wish to study, are educated such that they will enjoy a meaningful life after their education. It means that they are taught how to be free, if they live in a country that has endured years of dehumanisation and oppression. It means that they learn how to live-with-others (this lesson on living-with-others being concerned with the values of botho referred to earlier), if their society is one in which living apart from ‘others’ was for a long time a way of life.

Summary

Being-Black-in-the-World is intended as a contribution to the growing body of books and papers on the black experience. It is only very recently that concerted efforts have become manifest in the field of black studies at various universities in Africa and elsewhere. The extent of academic and lay interest in this field received concrete expression in the publication by Heinemann Educational Books in 1970 of a three-volume source book entitled The African Experience, which was edited by J.N. Paden and E.W. Soja.

The efforts of these academics are definitely deserving of our guarded admiration, although it is probably true to say that the most important contribution on the black experience will have to come from Africa. For it is here, on the African continent, where the great and intricate drama of being-black-in-the-world is taking place. In a field of study and life where there have been so many self-proclaimed experts, it is not always possible to say much that is worth saying. It is partly for this reason that I conceived of this book as essentially a small collection of essays reflecting my thinking on a number of subjects.

There has been no desire on my part to impose any form of structural unity on the book. To impose a structure would have been to tell an unpardonable lie, since my existence and experience are themselves fairly unstructured. The only formal structural requirements I attempted to adhere to are those relating to the internal consistency of the individual essays. This means that each essay has been an attempt to reflect on a specific aspect of the black experience. Overlapping with respect to theme reflects the writer's conviction that experience is not discrete but continuous.

This collection of essays addresses itself to a limited number of important questions. I consider the questions to be of general significance to South African society as a whole. Issues which are of such significance should be of interest to both academics and members of the lay public. It became necessary to keep this fact in view in the treatment of the various subjects in the collection. Technical terminology was reduced to a minimum in the more demanding essays. A glossary was considered necessary for purposes of clarity. Consideration of the collection as a whole revealed that there were enough questions raised for both the academically inclined and the general reader.

Summary

My search for how to see from Africa, authentically, had been going on for fifteen years when I received the Psychology and Social Change Award from Rhodes University. Or at least, that's what I said to my audience when I gave my lecture at the university. But this is off by decades. The search had begun almost immediately after the first lecture I attended as a psychology student. I still remember when I learned that black children, like white children, tend to prefer white dolls. I would come to know the names of the researchers who made this discovery: the black American psychologists Kenneth Clark (1914–2005) and Mamie Clark (1917–1983). To summarise their findings in one sentence, the doll-preference studies were simply showing that black children preferred and identified with whiteness more than blackness.

In 1955 Kenneth Clark published the book Prejudice and Your Child. His intended audience appears to have been black (or as black Americans were referred to then, Negro) parents. Here is an extract from the book:

In spite of the important and rapid steps toward better race relations in the larger society, the Negro parent is still faced with the responsibility of providing his children with the basic foundations of a healthy personality. It is difficult for these children to feel that they are of value unless they are given such indications within the intimate family unit. Negro children need special assurance that their parents love them and want them. These children need to know that this love is unconditional – that they are loved because they are human beings worthy of love and respect from other human beings. Paradoxically, the social forces that necessitate this relationship in the Negro family may interfere with the ability of these parents, particularly of the working classes, to express warmth, love, and acceptance for their children – for the Negro parent is himself the product of racial pressures and frustrations. It is imperative, however, that this cycle be broken. Because it cannot be broken by the child, it must be broken by parents and by the larger society. (1955: 115)

The question I had when I came across the Clarks’ original studies (Clark & Clark 1939a, 1939b, 1940, 1950) was, could this be true for South Africa?

Summary

To observe that psychology in Africa has been influenced by Euroamerican presuppositions, notions and morals is not an argument for a Euroamerican-centred psychology in Africa. Of course not. I am against precisely the wholesale importation of Euroamerican-centric ideologies, explanations, ways of seeing, values, norms and ways of being, conveyed in psychology, and their imposition upon the ways of living of the Others of white, capitalist, middle-class America and Western Europe.

At the same time, to argue against a psychology that centres Euroamerican presuppositions and ways of living in itself – although these may be thinly concealed by questions, theories, models and approaches that claim to be universal while privileging Western European and American ways of knowing, being, and relating to others – is not to be interpreted as a call to expunge all foreign ideas from African psychology. This would be an impossible task. Euroamericanism is in us. And some of its ideas are definitely worth keeping. Augustine Nwoye (2017: 44) has contended that ‘although some Eurocentric theories of the human personality or personhood … already exist, including those developed by some African American psychologists … some of which are very relevant to our experience, a continental African version of the theory of African human personhood is still needed’.

All psychologists in African countries, but in particular Africa-centring psychologists, ought to assert their right to, and avail themselves of, the European archive. It is common knowledge that Africa's encounter with Europe from the fifteenth century onwards forever changed both continents. Additionally, European civilisation contains property and ideas stolen from Africa and the New World. Most significant for African psychology, however, is the pronounced need for more interchanges, and more openness to influencing each other, across African countries. In this respect, mobility between different countries and exchanges among continental psychology students, researchers, teachers and therapists are necessary. Beyond such intra-African exchanges, African psychologists need to interact with African psychologists in the diaspora. And African psychologists must produce psychology for the world, not only for Africa.

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