There seem to be a number of reasons why the ethical and moral and political and existential duty to contribute to this task of realising an African-centred psychology is obscured. However, there is one major reason that reveals the problem faced by any woman or man in Africa who would call for an African psychology. That reason signals that what holds back the development of African psychology and its potential flourishing is multilayered: it is ontological, it is epistemological, it is political, it is cultural and it is psychical. That reason is the fact that some of us have absorbed the discourse that African psychology may have been necessary for Africans in America, but it was not needed for us, Africans, here at home. There is a pervasive feeling, attitude, or idea, usually unexpressed but one that can be found in action, that ‘we are in Africa and do not need an African psychology’.

Not to overstate it: we desperately and totally do. Some of our ancestors may have been captured and enslaved to work the cotton plantations in the Americas, but the slave ideology and colonialism affected even those who escaped the slave ships. Slavery and colonialism stained the whole world, and many black people are still discoloured and disfigured by its long-term effects. We need African psychology for the world, not just for African Americans, and not just for us, here, whose ancestors escaped the slavers’ clutches. Even though they sometimes cannot put a name to this need, many African students of psychology, scholars, teachers and practitioners who continue to be privately alienated in their classes, in their writings against the whiteness and Euroamerican nature of psychology in Africa, in their lives, need what African psychology can offer them.