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10963 results in Psychology: general interest

Page 145 of 549

The World Looks Like This From Here
  • Thoughts on African Psychology
  • Kopano Ratele
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    01 September 2019
  • What does the world look like from Africa? What does it mean to think, feel, express without apology for being African? How does one teach society and children to be African – with full consciousness and pride? In institutions of learning, what would a textbook on African-centred psychology look like? How do researchers and practitioners engage in African social psychology, African-centred child development, African neuropsychology, or any area of psychology that situates African realities at the centre? Questions such as these are what eminent professor of psychology Kopano Ratele grapples with in this lyrical, philosophical and poetic treatise on practising African psychology in a decolonised world view. Employing a style common in philosophy but rarely used in psychology, the book offers thoughts about the ideas, contestation, urgency and desire around a psychological praxis in Africa for Africans. While setting out a framework for researching, teaching and practicing African psychology, the book in part coaxes, in part commands and in part urges students of psychology, lecturers, researchers and therapists to reconsider and reach beyond their received notions of African psychology.

  • 85 - Notes on psychological African studies

  • 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 162-166

  • Summary

    Africa, it is true, tends to be a shadowy figure in mainstream global psychology, and for this reason if nothing else I have to be part of a resurgent project to centralise Africa in all areas of psychology in Africa. In my pursuit of this goal, Africa and the many meanings it attracts from foe and friend – some colonial, pejorative, racist, stereotypical, others nativist or mythological, and still others emancipatory, but always dense and elusive – are central figurations in my attempts to understand boys, men and masculinities (in Africa and elsewhere). I have to appreciate that Africa has been tremendously affected by the wars – armed, structural, cultural and symbolic – waged on its ordinary people by European and US imperialists, colonialists, home-grown dictators, army generals and capitalists. I am therefore keen to understand Africa itself as an actor, a dynamic entity on its own, an object of interest, and a place of knowledge-making, that needs thinking about within all studies, teaching and psychotherapy. In my case it means that in thinking about men and women and other genders, I have to think about them from where I am located and where they are positioned in a place in Africa. Psychological African studies as an orientation emerges from the need to use psychological tools to understand subjects as positioned in a world within Africa. As one of the four orientations within African psychology, psychological African studies at the basic level is primarily a transdisciplinary orientation towards Africa, Africans and psychology. In that sense it also has one foot in Western psychology and another in African studies. However, whereas Western psychology is defined as the study of individual behaviour, African studies refers to those studies whose object is Africa. Psychological African studies thus is defined as psychology aimed at integrating the theories, tools and insights of psychology, including tools from psychoanalysis, in order to study Africa (Ratele 2017a).

    Psychological African studies includes tools from psychoanalysis. An appreciation of the potential contribution and development of psychological and psychoanalytical African studies begins with an understanding that psychology or psychoanalysis was never one of the core disciplines in African studies.

  • 91 - Permeable boundaries

  • 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 184-185

  • Summary

    What distinguishes the various African psychological orientations shown in Figure 1 (Section 82) from each other is the manner in which two central ideas – Africa and psychology – are apprehended in each of them, although the way in which the two ideas are approached often remains implicit. The most significant element present in all of them, however, is that we, psychologists and students of psychology, are always situated, unconsciously or after deliberation. The four African psychologies can therefore be considered as ways in which actors are positioned in relation to Africa as an object of study, to psychology's place in Africa, to Africa as a place of knowledgemaking, as well as to their own being, social relations, perspectives and expertise. The crucial point is that orientation, or situatedness – that is, the way clinicians, counsellors, teachers of psychology and researchers are positioned or position themselves – has an effect on psychotherapy, counselling, teaching and research.

    The different African psychological orientations presented in Figure 1 are not meant to correspond to the established branches or areas of psychology such as critical psychology, cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, political psychology, economic psychology, or indigenous psychology. They are also not meant to correspond to established subdisciplines of psychology such as general, cognitive, developmental, personality, community and social psychology; nor to the categories of professional registration such as clinical, counselling, industrial, educational, research, neuropsychology and forensic psychology; nor to the divisions of the professional associations of psychologists. Instead, these different African psychological orientations are, in my assessment, found within the areas of work, within sub-disciplines, within registration categories, and within the divisions of the professional association. In South Africa, some areas of work, sub-disciplines, registration categories and divisions will evidence more debates on African psychology than others, simply because of the numbers involved.

    It is worth noting that African psychology teachers, researchers and psychotherapists can and do move across these different orientations. The boundaries between the four psychologies are permeable. It is likely that individual psychologists will at different points in time orient themselves in one way or another with regard to Africa and psychology.

  • 61 - The lost self

  • 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 121-121

  • Summary

    It is correct that conscientisation is born out of an awakening to a sense of failure in the face of the continued dominance of offshore models of knowledge and applications within African psychology. I have been a failure. I have been complicit in hawking oppression to black students. How could I have been so blind for so long? How did I think I knew what I was speaking of – please Professor, this way to the podium – when I did not have an authentic voice? It would seem that the struggle to clearly see our situation from an African-centred psychological perspective, the coming to awareness of our failure and collusion with oppression at the very moment we have been promoted and made to feel part of the insiders, comes out of the tussle with our lost selves in an upside-down world.

  • 21 - Fog and friction

  • 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 56-57

  • Summary

    Let us return to the question, what does it mean to say African in African psychology ought to be unspoken? What, precisely, is African psychology?

    To better appreciate the answers to these questions, let us begin with the second question first.

    Confusion abounds within and around the meaning of African psychology. One answer to the question is: African psychology is not American psychology. That much is clear. Another answer: African psychology is not European psychology. That is obvious too.

    Beyond that – we have fog and friction.

    I know why European and US psychologists – as well as Euroamerican-centred psychologists in Africa and elsewhere outside of Europe and the US – who subscribe to psychology as seen from Euroamerican psychological perspectives might be confused. Because of their own confusion they are usually confusing when they try to say something about African psychology. To believe that African psychology is a special type of psychology is to be confused.

    I know why much of what is written by African and African American psychologists who champion African psychology also does not make the concept easy to comprehend. Euroamerican psychology has been very effective in creating a great deal of the confusion among African students, therapists and teachers and the general public, let alone among white European and US students, teachers and therapists. One of the major confusions is that Euroamerican psychology is psychology, and anything else is (blank) psychology – where (blank) stands for any ‘indigenous’, othered and supposedly non-standard psychology which is not real psychology. Euroamerican psychology, apparently, is indigenous to nowhere. It is a body of knowledge with neither origin nor home.

    Regarding the first question, African in African psychology is what exists, at the best of times, when African psychology is not on the defensive, a term in brackets: (African) psychology. In other words, when African psychology is psychology. Paradoxically, the best African psychology is therefore knowledge and practice that begin from consciousness-raising about ways of seeing people's lives – from the birth of a baby to the moment of death – through Africa's window; knowledge and practice that, over time, become unconscious. The best African psychological perspective is one that has settled at the unselfconscious level and does not name itself.

  • 55 - (African) American 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 110-112

  • 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.

  • 94 - (African) developmental 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 191-194

  • 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.

  • 65 - Birth of a discipline

  • 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 127-128

  • 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.

  • 80 - A contingent term

  • 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 148-149

  • 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.

  • 49 - Satisfied with alienation

  • 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 102-102

  • 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?

  • 48 - Only a situated understanding will do

  • 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 101-101

  • 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

  • 98 - Psychological freedom

  • 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 201-208

  • 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.

  • 68 - Lineage and authority

  • 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 131-131

  • 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.

  • 34 - Defining by affirmation

  • 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 82-82

  • Summary

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

  • African-centred psychology is about seeing.

  • African-centred psychology is about language.

  • African-centred psychology is knowledge that begins with an inward-looking process, with speaking not about yourself but about the world as you have come to know it.

  • African-centred psychology is a reawakening, a road towards emancipation, a project that encompasses emotional, cognitive, cultural, political and economic attitudes and practices.

  • African-centred psychology is a call to rid yourself of the shackles of intellectual servitude to Euroamerican-centred knowledge.

  • African-centred psychology is the antithesis of oppressive knowledge about Africa and Africans.

  • African-centred psychology is about consciously and intelligently placing Africa at the centre of your psychological work.

  • African-centred psychology is attentive to history.

  • African-centred psychology is resistance.

  • African-centred psychology is a position in psychology, not something outside of it, even though it can exceed received psychology, even though it has to push beyond the boundaries of Euroamerican-dominated global psychology by studying topics of significance to people in Africa, producing therapeutic techniques that work for the greatest number of people in Africa, and teaching psychology about Africa.

  • 66 - Paternity claims

  • 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 129-129

  • 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.

  • 3 - Disorientation

  • 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 4-5

  • 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).

  • 54 - A proposal

  • 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 108-109

  • 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.)

  • 42 - It's power, stupid

  • 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 92-93

  • 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.

Page 145 of 549