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:

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?