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10963 results in Psychology: general interest

Page 144 of 549

  • 30 - Terminology

  • 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 71-78

  • Summary

    We have touched on some terms already. Here are other key terms of which to take note, with brief descriptions:

    Western/Euroamerican psychology: Western or Euroamerican psychology is all psychology concerning Europe and the US. Euroamerican-oriented psychology is found not only in the US and European countries but all over the world, including Africa. It dominates Africa and the rest of the world. Euroamerican psychology in Africa is also what at times I refer to as psychology-in-Africa (which is to be understood as different from psychology for Africa) in my framework of four orientations in African psychology presented in section 82. Euroamerican psychology puts the experiences of mainly white, Western European and US, middle- to upper-class, usually heterosexual men and women, but also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexed (LGBTQI) Westerners, at the centre of its world. Even when it is exported to Africa, Western-centred psychology ultimately serves the economic, political and cultural ends of Europe and the US. In the most general terms, mainstream Euroamerican psychology tends to assume (and, based on this assumption, to pose questions, design studies, make interpretations, offer psychotherapies and prescribe psycho-pharmacological medication that support the assumption) that life experiences have to be better and more satisfying in the capitals of Western Europe and America for a certain economic class of people. Conversely, people in their right mind – meaning psychologically healthy – cannot really have a full, meaningful and satisfying life in Africa or other parts of the world, certainly not if they are money-poor (in contrast to spiritually poor, for example) and do not subscribe to assumptions underpinning mainstream Euroamerican psychology. ‘Euroamerican psychological research has for long served as a rationalising bulwark,’ the great Somali psychologist Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan (1980: 20) observed, ‘stifling consciousness as well as conscience regarding the ruthless exploitation of the African.’

    African psychology: There are some people, such as my colleagues at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) – and it is worth mentioning here Nhlanhla Mkhize and Augustine Nwoye – who apparently hold the view that African psychology is a field in psychology (see Mkhize 2004; Nwoye 2015). More specifically, they seem to consider African psychology as a branch of psychology, similar to how psychologists usually think of developmental psychology, neuropsychology, or social psychology.

  • 56 - Mischievous questions

  • 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 113-113

  • Summary

    In ‘What is African psychology the psychology of?’ Augustine Nwoye (2015) asks several questions, including the title question, which could be seen as mischievous, as they appear to dismiss decades of substantial work by black scholars in the US on the same question, as well as their efforts to develop African psychology. These questions include:

    What constitutes the major phases in the evolution of African psychology; in what ways can African psychology be defined and conceptualized; what are the principal goals of African psychology; in what ways can African psychology be distinguished from Western psychology; what constitutes the epistemological foundations of African psychology; and what constitutes the subject-matter of African psychology? (2015: 97)

    However, what Nwoye may also be understood to be arguing is that the raison d’être, status and delineation of African psychology for and within African countries should be considered.

  • 74 - Making space for all

  • 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 141-141

  • Summary

    Does African psychology refer to studies conducted and healing techniques practised on Africans? Not necessarily. African psychology can study non-Africans. We are obligated to ensure that it does so. It will never be enough to stop at Africans, if it is Euroamerican psychology that shapes how we think about Africa and the world. The world has to be remade in our image, to make space for all of us, if we are to feel at home wherever we might be.

    It is true that you come across some academics and practitioners who mistakenly reduce African psychology to a psychology that studies only Africans. However, a vast literature indicates that African psychology is – and must be – the study of all forms of behaviours and relationships, including behaviours of and relationships between non-Africans and Africans, as well as between humans and animals.

    An even more crucial point that bears repeating: all of psychology done in and for Africa, by and about Africans, by Africans and non-Africans (working on questions related to Africa and Africans) is African psychology.

  • 20 - Three problems

  • 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 53-55

  • Summary

    To seek to entrench African-centred psychology is a quest to better locate Africa and Africans in knowledge. To try to locate Africans better means to situate them in less stereo-typical ways, to produce ideas that are disalienating for a meaningful life in Africa. ‘Disalienating ideas’ refers to those ideas whose underlying, if not always articulated, object is to situate Africa as a place of knowledge-making for the world and to locate Africans as theory makers, not only data creators. This object encompasses investigation of the very question of what knowledge itself is, as well as of its dissemination – the building of publics for the knowledge we create as researchers, teachers, students, professionals, policymakers, or activists. The primary question that we must deal with in African-centred knowledge is therefore always about the location of knowledge and being, as well as of power, after the facts of colonialism, slavery and apartheid.

    The future of African-centred psychology does not lie in repeating the demand for it to exist alongside Euroamericancentred psychology. It lies in doing many more research studies centring Africa. Large as well as in-depth studies. Theoretical work that situates itself within cultures and institutions in Africa while generating explanations that have global meaning. It lies in unapologetically situating the fact of being in Africa in our lecture rooms, in university policies, in professional networks and associations. In understanding the self as deeply ‘affected’ by being of Africa and situated in a place in Africa. All this we have to do if we are to extricate ourselves from the enduring effects of colonial, slavocratic and apartheid systems of power, feeling, thought and being.

    There are, however, three problems that confront psychologists and students in trying to see the world, their work and themselves from an African centre.

    The first problem we face as psychologists or students in trying to think, teach, heal, learn, feel, or work while keeping Africa at the centre of the world is precisely how colonialism comes to reshape knowledge about what it means to be human. As part of the colonial and apartheid intellectual arsenal, psychology was weaponised, along with other sciences, towards the making of a certain understanding of Africans, who came to be thought of as black, as a different species of humans.

  • 6 - Off-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 14-15

  • 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.

  • 59 - A new course

  • 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 117-118

  • 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.

  • 44 - A psychological history of struggle

  • 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 96-96

  • 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.

  • 28 - Estrangement

  • 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 64-67

  • 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.

  • 62 - An unacknowledged past

  • 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 122-123

  • 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.

  • 1 - Who Are the Urban Africans?

  • 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 8-19

  • 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.

  • 24 - Superhuman subhuman

  • 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 60-60

  • 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?

  • 35 - Scholarly extraverts and introverts

  • 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 83-83

  • 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.

  • 7 - Words are not enough

  • 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 16-16

  • 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.

  • 97 - Tenets of 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 199-200

  • 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.

  • 31 - Defining by negation

  • 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 79-79

  • Summary

    Seven things that, in my framework, African psychology is

    not:

  • African psychology is not a discipline outside of psychology.

  • African psychology is not a sub-discipline of psychology.

  • African psychology is not a specific area of study, such as the study of traditional African healing practices.

  • African psychology is not only a psychology practised on Africans.

  • African psychology is not only a psychology practised by Africans.

  • African psychology is not only for Africans.

  • African psychology is not only from Africa; like Euroamerican psychology, it can be taught at European universities, can be dramatised in US television sitcoms, can be applied in therapy rooms in Australia.

  • 5 - Nausea

  • 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 57-64

  • 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.

  • 25 - Sources of negativity

  • 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 61-61

  • 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.

  • 41 - A heterogeneous terrain

  • 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 91-91

  • 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.

  • 70 - Interconnectivity

  • 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 134-136

  • 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.

Page 144 of 549