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10963 results in Psychology: general interest

Page 141 of 549

  • 7 - The Meaning of Change

  • N. Chabani Manganyi
  • Book:
    Being Black in the World
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 87-96

  • Summary

    During the year 1972, there was a great deal of noise here and abroad about what some people considered to be indications of change in the ‘South African way of life’. It was suggested that these pointers of change could be identified in the political and economic spheres. Examples of this change were given. Following the Polaroid troubles, two big banking houses decided to ‘equalise’ salaries of blacks and whites. There were public demands for a general narrowing of the wage gap as well as the organisation of black labour into trade unions. On the political front, people were saying that there was a need for ‘dialogue’ with the black communities. Some observers also suggested that the South African government was revealing a more mature attitude towards the Buthelezis. Others observed that the Afrikaner was beginning to show some restlessness and was becoming more open and critical about the national policies of his government. When one looks back at all those ‘happenings’ one begins to wonder whether this change was apparent or real. Can it be truly said that South African society is changing? If this is so, what may be identified as the particular direction and form of this change? And would black and white South Africans be able to reach common agreement on the possible significance of this change? This essay concerns itself with these questions since we consider it necessary to achieve a black perspective (interpretation) on them.

    We begin our analysis by borrowing some of the refreshing ideas of Prof. J.H. Moolman (1972), director of the African Institute in Pretoria. In spite of the unacceptability of some of his views, it should be admitted that he is an outstanding academic. One of his latest suggestions is that the Republic of South Africa should be viewed as a spatial system. He points out that this spatial system ‘consists mainly of a white and black component’. Recognition is given to the fact that the white component is the dominant one in the system. Into the total spatial system was introduced the policy of separate development which has given birth to the concepts of ‘homelands’ and ‘national units’, which are now subsystems in the total spatial system. Some observations relating to these views may now be made.

  • 52 - Returning to definition

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 105-105

  • Summary

    Let us return to definitions so that we can deepen our appreciation of African psychology.

    This is one definition you have seen already: African psychology is all psychology out of Africa. This is not altogether wrong. However, it leaves out some significant qualifications. All of psychology in Africa is not for Africa (although African psychology cannot be only for Africa). Much of the psychology work published in Africa is dominated by Western psychology and, in supporting the hegemonic psychological explanations, also bolsters the global hegemony of the US and Europe over Africa. Sometimes this support is given knowingly because the author favours the hegemonic explanations of the world derived from Europe and the US. At other times the support is inadvertent because he or she does not know how to do anything else. And at yet other times, there is pressure to publish, and the author is simply playing the game.

    Another definition: African psychology is psychology practised by Africans. Although African psychology cannot but somehow reference Africans, this definition is also incomplete. What of African psychology that emerges out of the US – African psychology practised by African Americans? Inadequate for our purpose.

  • 79 - Debates and contests

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 147-147

  • Summary

    There are two crucial and specific limitations of the label ‘African psychology’ that are worth accentuating.

    First, unless your desire is to contort yourself like a circus freak, all psychology regarding Africa and Africans on the continent and in the diaspora has to be counted in the body of what is seen as African psychology. This seems a straightforward characterisation – except when it is not.

    Second, the problem with the name ‘African psychology’ arises from the fact that debates about African psychology reference, usually implicitly, other debates about histories of slavery, colonialism and racism. African psychology partakes in existential, ontological and political contests such as those about who can be African, and whose home is Africa, besides those issues of who can teach about Africa, who is entitled to teach Africans, and who can do psychological repair work among Africans. An implication of all these broad and specific contests and debates is that it is hard for African psychology not to be political, even when it wishes to remain neutral, as these issues derive from the politics in African countries.

  • 9 - Psychology is culture

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 19-22

  • Summary

    Harry Charalambos Triandis was born in 1926 in Greece. In his twenties he left his ancestral home for Canada, where he did his undergraduate studies at McGill University. He moved on to the University of Toronto for further studies before going down to Cornell University in the US for his doctoral work. Triandis is important here not because he went on to occupy several noteworthy positions in the American and international psychology fraternity, including serving as president of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology. His importance stems from the fact that in one of his books he actually mentions Africa. It is not a flattering mention. This does not mean that those who do not mention Africa do not hold views about it; but, having had the courage to utter the word, Triandis offers us something to which we can directly respond. In the book in question, Culture and Social Behaviour, published in 1994, this Greek-born and Western-educated social psychologist relates an interesting story about the first time he visited India in 1965. It is a tale about a hotel in Mysore, recounting an inconvenience caused by an amusing cultural misunderstanding and an ensuing happy ending. The point of the story is that ‘we are not aware of our own culture unless we come in contact with another one’ (Triandis 1994: 3). After narrating the anecdote, Triandis writes:

    While this anecdote is amusing and instructive, it raises an important issue: how much of the context of psychology may in fact be a distortion when applied to other cultures? When I started editing the six-volume Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology, I asked myself that question. I wrote to some forty colleagues, all over the world, and asked them to send me psychological findings from their culture that are not totally in agreement with findings published in the West. I got back very little. I was frustrated until Terry Prothro, then at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, pointed out to me that our training and methods are also culture bound, and it is difficult to find new ideas without the theoretical and methodological tools that can extract them from a culture. Most of the people I had written to had gotten their doctorates in Western universities and would not have been especially good at analyzing their own cultures from a non-Western viewpoint.

  • 87 - Traditions and modernities

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 168-168

  • Summary

    I am struck by the understanding that we cannot fully grasp, on a large scale and in granular detail, the development of African modernities without first appreciating the challenges and hold of the past, of history and traditions. We will find it hard, for example, to understand how some people speak of their experience of modern African cities such as Lagos and Luanda, in contrast to how they speak of their experience of traditional life, without first understanding the store many people set by cultures and traditions while also struggling to have those cultures and traditions respond to their contemporary needs in African urban spaces.

  • 10 - Africa internationalised

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 23-25

  • Summary

    Some gains for African-centred psychological work will issue from publishing internationally. There is little doubt about this. African-centred psychology must internationalise if it is to influence the world. If we do not universalise we shall not avoid ghettoisation.

    I should be clearer. Of course it is always a little hard to persuade editors of ‘international’ journals – which is how journals published in the US and Western Europe are referred to in my country – and reviewers in other countries of the solidity and quality of your work, especially if such work goes against the orthodoxy of the discipline. The effort of persuasion is harder for some than for others. It is easier for those who are happy to go along with the globally hegemonic forms of knowledge, methods and tools of analysis, and harder for those who refuse to succumb to the orthodoxy. The latter is the case when it comes to African-centred work that fundamentally challenges how the world is ordered and perceived. In such cases, you have to sweat to convince editors and reviewers that Africa is a place of making thought. You are more than likely to have to work very hard to convince others that Africa is not only a site of data collection, but one where explanations and concepts – what is often pretentiously called Theory – are generated that are as valid as those from anywhere else in the world. It can be tiresome to put effort into trying to convince people that you, as a professional psychologist, have original thoughts, let alone that a ninety-year-old man who grows his own vegetables, raises his grandchildren, draws a government pension, but has never actually published an article, has a considered psychological perspective which should receive equal due to that of a psychology professor. Some will die spiritually or culturally – have died – trying to show some famous name who knows nothing about Africa and his students that African perspectives, conceptualisations and explanations matter.

    But, again, there are some gains to be made, no doubt, from working to publish African-centred psychological research and theory with international publishers and in international journals.

  • 29 - The centre

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 68-70

  • Summary

    The notion of centre, of centredness, or what Molefi Kete Asante (1991) refers to as centricity, is key to my efforts to contribute towards African-centred psychology. In his article ‘The Afrocentric idea in education’ published in The Journal of Negro Education, Asante writes: ‘centricity refers to a perspective that involves locating students within the context of their own cultural references so that they can relate socially and psychologically to other cultural perspectives’ (1991: 171). I have come to see how I have walked some of the same paths walked by other black scholars in African countries and in America, like Asante; I feel cheated, I am afraid, for not having known the notions of centricity and Afrocentricity when I was struggling with my voice, perspective and sense of alienation while teaching psychology, between October 1996 and April 2004.

    In the same article Asante observes ‘that the most productive method of teaching any student is to place his or her group within the center of the context’ (1991: 171). In my view this is a self-evident truth, and hence something with which I totally agree – the utter significance of locating a student and his or her values and material structures of living at the centre of the context of learning. Learning is decidedly easier if students can relate the new content to something in their lives. It is hard to see something in your mind if you cannot see it, and even more so if you have no view of yourself. As Asante says in his book An Afrocentric Manifesto, Afrocentricity ‘is a theory of agency, the idea that African people must be viewed and view themselves as agents rather than spectators to historical revolution and change’ (2007: 17).

    What I bring to psychology with the idea of being centred is that it is not applicable only to teaching and learning. A centred psychology, a centring of Africa in psychology, applies to research too. The first thing you start to appreciate when you wish to conduct a study from an African-centred psychological perspective is that the least alienating of light is cast on your topic and your participants if you place what philosophers refer to as lived experiences of the participants – their personal accounting of their own experiences – at the centre of your study.

Being Black in the World
  • N. Chabani Manganyi
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019
  • Being-Black-in-the-World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi's first publications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change. The Black Consciousness movement had emerged in the mid-1960s and the African continent was throwing off its colonial yoke. In South Africa, renewed resistance to the brutality of apartheid rule would detonate in the Soweto uprising led by black school children three years later. Publication of Being-Black-in-the-World was delayed until the young Manganyi had left the country to study at Yale University. His publishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces would prohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, for being a 'radical revolutionary'. The book thus found a limited public circulation in South Africa and original copies were hard to come by. This new edition, in contrast to its previous suppression, is an invitation to the #FeesMustFall generation to engage freely with early decolonising thought by an eminent South African intellectual. An astute social and political observer, Manganyi has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race. In 2018 Manganyi's memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist was awarded the prestigious ASSAf (The Academy of Science of South Africa) Humanities Book Award. Each of these short essays can be read as self-contained reflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. Manganyi is a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from making incisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. While the essays are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regarding black subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality, the persistence of a racial (and racist) order and the need for a renewed decolonising project. The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to make sense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to black suffering. Ahead of their time, the ideas in this book are an exemplary demonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous decolonising critique should entail. The re-publication of this classic text is enriched by the inclusion of a foreword and annotation by respected scholars Garth Stevens and Grahame Hayes respectively, and an afterword by public intellectual Njabulo S. Ndebele.

  • 88 - Further notes on cultural African psychology

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 169-177

  • Summary

    What can you do with cultural African psychology? From a certain angle, values are at the heart of the science of human behaviour. Perhaps all human activity is always about values. If this is so, then value-based African psychology enables what no other kind of psychology has been able to do – that is, understanding human beings as value-driven. To study psychology from this orientation would be to study how people are driven by, make, contest and change values.

    To illustrate the potential of cultural African psychology, consider most events we might read of in newspapers or witness in daily life. Whether it is in relation to the uplifting acts by Orlando Pirates soccer players Kermit Erasmus and Daine Klate in walking onto the pitch with their kids to collect their Nedbank Cup medals and trophy, or Boko Haram's abduction of more than two hundred girls in Chibok, Nigeria, or the trial of the athlete Oscar Pistorius for fatally shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, the question of how cultures are organised, what humans value, or what we believe about a range of phenomena is always in play. In the above examples, we see how footballers interact with their children (in a way that has become more widely acceptable only in recent decades, and was not commonplace in previous generations); how terrorists relate to girls and young women (abducting them and forcing them into marriage); how some men relate to their intimate partners (and the violence that attends such relationships). What connects these examples is the subject of men and masculinity, and some of the associations of masculinity with cultural beliefs and values. What research investigations from the vantage point of, and courses in, value-based African psychology might be able to offer in these instances are insights into the conditions that facilitate involved fatherhood among footballers; the prevalent kinds of relational norms and perceptions of girls and women among terrorists; and contradictions in enactments of, and discourses on, values on violence and love in intimate partnerships.

    This is a well-known fact, but it might be useful to repeat it here: a culture that leaves emotional nurturance of children to women tends to be one in which men are left – leave themselves – to do the soccer playing, thinking, fighting, earning and politics.

  • 96 - Awake to yourself

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 198-198

  • Summary

    Someone says, ‘Moving to New York gave me a whole new perspective on the world.’ What does she mean?

    Or, at some point in your life, you may have said something like, ‘Johannesburg [or whatever place you have moved to] opened my eyes.’ What did you mean?

    I say, becoming fully conscious to what it means to be you, to be awake to what it entails to be of African descent, to recognise yourself as black, to be white and born in Africa, or to be of a kind of heterogeneous heritage and identify with Africa, is what fundamentally shifts your understanding of the world, whether you are in Johannesburg or New York.

    I say, taking time to learn how you are made to see the world, and then cultivating your own way of seeing the world, regardless of where you find yourself, is what opens your eyes.

  • 84 - The world as it is

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 155-161

  • Summary

    Under what conditions would you consider a thesis, say a master's or doctoral study, as excellent that quotes only or mainly authors from Western Europe or North America?

    I read many master's and doctoral theses in my areas of interests. Some I read so as to keep abreast of what students and young researchers are doing in the field. Others because I am asked to examine them. Many of these are adequate. In fact, I could say that many of these dissertations are more than just satisfactory when compared to some of the works I have read from universities outside Africa. But because of the colonial inferiorisation of intellectual work coming from Africa, both teachers and students often fail to recognise the warped and alienating standards they have set for themselves.

    The inferiorisation of much of the intellectual thought produced in Africa is internalised by blacks and whites in Africa alike. We find here, then, an instantiation of what Harry Triandis (1994) was referring to: the fact that many psychology students and psychologists in Africa have an inferiority complex vis-a-vis American and Western European psychology. Dissertations are considered good merely because they quote all the ‘right sources’, and thus are associated with some amorphous external standard set in the West.

    Sometimes, however, the standard is very well defined: you have to read this researcher or that theorist, and nearly ten times out of ten it is someone coming from Europe or America – John Bowlby or Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Stanley Milgram or Melanie Klein, Abraham Maslow or Max Wertheimer; you cannot not read this theory, explanation, or model and be passed.

    The crucial point is not that these theorists do not have anything worthwhile to say about conditions in Africa. It is not to argue that there is nothing to learn from explanations about psychological life developed in Europe and America. It is, rather, that the idea of the West is being elevated to the standard against which we measure the excellence of the work itself. To repeat what I said earlier: we have to overcome these pervasive and debilitating inferiority complexes.

    It is on this terrain that you come upon a terrifically thought-provoking problematic. Some of the master's and doctoral work I read is really superb.

  • 37 - Points on a continuum

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 85-86

  • Summary

    Making the distinction between scholarly extraversion and introversion in African psychology is a way to reflect on the term ‘centring’. Scholarly extraversion and introversion are two end points of a continuum. The confusion and battles within African psychology revolve around the question of how psychologists might be able to locate themselves on this continuum.

    To one side you find a psychologist who sees relatively little wrong with much of the psychology that she practises, or with many of the approaches to teaching and research that she employs, or with many of the therapeutic healing practices she uses on her clients. The thing is that, even though some of us may suspect that the way we live and where we work contribute, by omission if not commission, to socioeconomic injustice, or that the discipline of psychology is dominated by US and Western European patriarchal capitalist interests, we may feel that we are better off with the world of psychology as it is. Ironically, those who see nothing fundamentally off-colour with much of psychology as it is, include those of us who identify as social-justice-oriented psychologists. We may recognise and critique what is wrong with mainstream, non-critical, hegemonic psychology and its methods and explanations. But we do hold very dearly to, and our differentiation is marked by, our knowledge of our Brownmillers, Butlers and Cixouses, our Chomskys, De Beauvoirs and Derridas, our Du Boises, Foucaults and Lacans. That is to say, we privilege the major critical and radical European and US thinkers, be they male, female, or other genders/sexes, white, black, brown, or of other racially or ethnically defined groups. The centre of gravity of this offshore model of African psychology is Europe and the US. As an offshore, extraverted psychology, this African psychology primarily looks to places outside of the continent for legitimation and reward, using the locals mainly as a site of data extraction or application. This African psychology might be taught and written in some African universities, but it is actually epistemologically, ontologically, cognitively and emotionally invested elsewhere.

  • 60 - Complicity

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 119-120

  • Summary

    I have not always been fully conscientised to my complicity in perpetuating colonial and apartheid-informed models of knowledge, being in the world, and sociopolitical relations.

    It is easier to explain why psychologists who are descended from the side of the colonial and apartheid oppressors may not be conscientised that the lesson they learned at home about what it means to be a white human can be oppressive of black humans. It is not hard to find reasons why psychologists who racially identify as white would be unaware of why apartheid models of knowledge are objectionable. But it is difficult to explain why psychologists descended from the side of the oppressed would not readily grasp that Euroamerican psychology was primarily intended to support the exploitation and control of African countries by the West and its middlemen. Like many psychologists from the ranks of the historically colonised, as a teacher and researcher I have not always admitted that standing in front of a class of students and teaching from a textbook that treats Africa as if it were a footnote always made me complicit in reproducing the dominance of Euroamerican psychology.

    You do not have to be an outright collaborator with the enemy to be complicit in the oppression of your self-defined ‘own people’. You do not have to be a Lucas Mangope to sell out your people. (Mangope was one of the so-called black leaders of the fake black homeland of Bophuthatswana under the apartheid Bantustan system. The white apartheid government designated Bophuthatswana a republic for the Tswana-language speakers of South Africa. Any Tswana speaker was liable to be forcibly removed from white South Africa after Bophuthatswana had been given ‘independence’. Like other fake black homeland leaders, Mangope was more than happy with this fake independence as it made him the president of the fake republic.) You do not have to be an askari – the term given to the black turncoats who joined the security apparatus of the apartheid government. A teacher of psychology does not have to actively want to sell oppressive knowledge to black students. And of course there is a difference between those who actively supported the apartheid government as askaris and those who were passively complicit with apartheid policy.

  • 71 - Four axioms

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 137-137

  • Summary

    Four more statements about African psychology (one has to do this again and again until African in African psychology becomes unconscious):

  • All of psychology done in and for Africa is African psychology.

  • All psychological studies by and about Africans are part of African psychology.

  • Both Africans and non-Africans (studying Africans) can do African psychology.

  • African psychology is about Africa and Africans in psychology.

  • 89 - A note on critical African psychology

  • Kopano Ratele
  • Book:
    The World Looks Like This From Here
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 178-178

  • Summary

    With a more materialist, political, or critical orientation, African psychology seeks to be attentive to the materiality or structures of daily life, including economic and political and other social institutions and structures. This is what I refer to as critical African psychology. As it concerns itself with structures that govern our lives, including our cognitive and emotional lives, another name we can give to this critical African psychological orientation is structural psychology. According to this stance, these institutions and structures are seen as shaping psychology, and a critical African psychology perceives itself as oppositionally situated, within yet against economic, political and other structures. Like the previous two orientations, critically oriented African psychology tends to be interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, appropriating its theories and methods from critical and radical African thought, critical Western psychology, and critical and radical Western thought more generally. Critical and structurally inclined African psychologists prefer to pose questions about the workings of power and knowledge in societies, institutions, groups, relationships and within psychology. This orientation is distinguished from cultural African psychology by its suspicious stance not only towards US and Western European psychology, but also towards all psychology and notions of culture.

  • 3 - Us and Them

  • N. Chabani Manganyi
  • Book:
    Being Black in the World
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019, pp 32-45

  • Summary

    Before the advent of the policy of separate development, some observers believed South Africa to be a multiracial national state. The historic victory of the Nationalist Party in 1948 changed all that. It is now common in certain circles in South Africa to talk in terms of multinationalism. It is claimed by some exponents of the policy of separate development that South Africa is a country consisting of many races, ethnic groups, languages and cultures. This, in fact, is true. The exponents go on to suggest that it is in recognition of this diversity that South Africa must be Balkanised into several national (ethnic) units.

    Policy affecting the country as a whole may be decided on the basis of the above categories. It is questionable whether individual relations and group relationships between blacks and whites are motivated and supported by such considerations. These relationships appear to be determined at much lower and simpler levels. This seems to arise from the fact that in race-conscious environments, such as ours, it is difficult for individuals and groups to develop ways of action, feeling and thinking which transcend the categorical relationships involved in us (in-group) and them (out-group). ‘Us’ and ‘them’ constitute, in our society, a linguistic attitudinal form, expressive of distance and relation, and as such may be considered to be in the domain of Buber's philosophy of dialogue.

    It will be shown in this essay that these categorical relations are related, in our society, to different experiences – two modes of being-in-the-world. These two existential experiences may be characterised as being-black-in-the-world and being-white-in-the-world. It has to be admitted that the primary mode of being-in-the-world, of existing, is a given, and is therefore universal. The differences between the white and black experiences of being-in-the-world have arisen because of the fact that man, unlike other lower animals, is a historical being.

    There will be time to return to the above issues. But before that is undertaken, I would like to make some more general observations about the South African social environment.

    The general issues relating to man's tribalism have been adequately treated by Niebuhr (1966). The concerns here are more specific than his, and relate to a particular environment with its historical and cultural contingencies.

Page 141 of 549