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4968 results in Wits University Press

Page 70 of 249

  • 4 - Awake to Africa

  • 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 6-7

  • Summary

    Whereas Africa tends in large measure to be regarded in psychological studies as little more than an extractive data site, to begin by thinking of Africa and African as unspoken terms in African psychology is to awake to Africa – to the fact of being African, or of researching, teaching, doing psychotherapy, or studying in a place in Africa – as ontologically and epistemologically productive elements of the process of understanding, in psychological terms, the lives of individuals in the countries of Africa, from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

    To be able to fully realise such a situated psychology, one that authoritatively but wordlessly situates Africa and the dynamic and complex psychological lives of Africans – the cognitive, emotional, motivational, relational, experiential, cultural and behavioural aspects of their lives – at the centre of the field of psychology, is the ultimate epistemic (regarding questions of knowledge) and ontological (concerned with questions of what it means to be human and to live with other forms of life) goal of this kind of African psychology. What is that African psychology to which we are referring, after all, if not a situated psychology?

    At the same time, because African psychology demands engagement in what the black Caribbean Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon (2007: 121) calls ‘explicit adjectival techniques of appearance’, consciously centring Africa and Africans in psychology, as in all of the sciences and the arts, without uttering these terms, is something we must learn to do. To do African psychology without explicitly mentioning Africa is to clear space in the present and in history, and prevail over the erasures of Euroamerican psychology. To do psychology that assumes Africa is to claim recognition and, even more critically, to assert the fact that all of the world can be cognised from here. Because, on the whole, only a psychology that centres on a certain life lived in Western Europe and the US has so far enjoyed the power of referring to itself without the need for adjectives, and doing African psychology can mean feeling compelled to locate your work as African. The goal is to make this unnecessary, although the compulsion imposed by Euroamerican psychologists, journal editors and reviewers, and book publishers is quite real.

  • 2 - The necessary adjective

  • 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 2-3

  • Summary

    Confusion is never far off regarding what precisely is being referred to whenever the term ‘African psychology’ is uttered. We ought to note, therefore, at this early point that there is more than one way of defining African psychology. This is how my co-authors and I have written about the multiple meanings of the term: ‘African psychology means the same thing as, for example, psychology in, by, from, or of Africa or Africans’ (Ratele et al. 2018: 332). (I should add: psychology for Africa or Africans.) That is to say, African psychology can mean psychology in Western Sahara or South Sudan. It can mean psychology practised by Egyptians or Ethiopians. Psychology from Senegal or South Africa. Psychology of Africa, or of one or other African nation. Psychology for Africans. All of this implies that we always have to ask what preposition is being elided between ‘psychology’ and ‘Africa/n’, in order to define the kind of African psychology to which we are referring. It also means that there is always a question of why there should be a need for African psychology, when the ‘science’ of psychology is said to be universal. But, fundamentally, it is the notion of universal human science – of its truthfulness and completeness – that is at stake: a human science that bears no marks of the humans who produce it, that has been shorn of values and normativity.

    It is of utmost importance to note, then, that it is not in all of African psychology that Africa and Africans are implied – only in the kind of African psychology that will be advanced here. This is African psychology sensu stricto (in the narrow sense): psychology that places Africa and Africans at its centre, while simultaneously being open and talking to a wider world.

    The psychology that tacitly places Africa and Africans at its centre is, however, the ideal. That psychology emerges from under the rubble of colonial ruins, apartheid racism and post-independence despotism. The time when a psychology student at the University of Johannesburg says, ‘I am studying psychology,’ and is immediately presumed to be referring to African psychology, is in the future.

  • 32 - Self-sabotage

  • 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 80-80

  • Summary

    An African-centred psychologist can say, ‘I study cognitive development from an African perspective,’ of course. But the moment you utter those words, despite your conscious intention, you have already betrayed your unconscious wish and real desire. Your real desire is to persuade the audience of the rightness of your study. Your unconscious wish is for your view to be accepted. As such, you have undermined the potential influence of your study. And you will be rejected.

    The argument that when a female researcher feels compelled to state (to give another example), ‘My master's study looked at stress among first-generation middle-class women and men from an African feminist perspective,’ she has already undermined the potential influence of her study, arises from the knowledge that the most likely question that follows her declaration is not, ‘What did you find?’ but rather, ‘What is an African feminist perspective?’ This is not necessarily an unwelcome question if you are developing an African feminist perspective. But it may be distressing when you wish to talk about stress, and that is the main question in which your audience is interested.

  • 38 - Invisible Africa

  • 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 87-88

  • Summary

    The problem of a nebulous Africa is found in all the sub-disciplines of Euroamerican psychology.

    The issue of a master knowledge – and knowledge-making tools – is not confined to psychology and its specialities. A similar problem, to a greater or lesser degree, can be observed in anthropology, economics, gender studies, geography, management studies, political science and sociology. Within psychology, the hegemony of Euroamerican-centrism and its associated master's gaze, ideas and techniques of knowledge-making is more obvious in some branches of the discipline, like psychopathology, assessment and developmental psychology, than in others, like biological psychology.

    But it is when we take a look at the less mainstream areas of psychology like community, critical, or cultural psychology that we are confronted with a deep irony: that even those who regard themselves as critics or on the margins of traditional psychology are capable of reproducing an imperialist and colonial architecture of knowledge in their relations with Africa. Thus, the problem of an invisible Africa and the marginality of African thought inheres in the core of the discipline of psychology – indeed, in the very foundations of the social sciences and humanities as a whole. The foundations of psychology, as a discipline rooted in Euroamerican-centred modernity, were built on its opposition to Africa as a primitive object, as lacking, as an absence.

    The Nigerian literary scholar and poet Harry Garuba's perceptiveness about the development of silences in the production of disciplines, and how they come to be taken up in Africa, is instructive (Garuba 2012). His insights suggest to me why, in the light of the long process of developing and consolidating the discipline of psychology, a process that began in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to appreciate the role assigned to Africa and Africans. Recognition of the need for an African-centred emancipatory psychology thus begins with an understanding of how Africa and Africans were imagined at the founding of the social sciences and humanities, and still are in these disciplines as we have them today.

  • 50 - A worldwide need

  • 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 103-103

  • Summary

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

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

  • 82 - Four orientations

  • 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 151-152

  • Summary

    Having come this far, I would now like to give an outline of my framework for (thinking about and doing and seeing) African psychology as situated knowledge and practice. Better yet, of understanding African psychology as a set of orientations. Whereas we can be forgiven for thinking of African psychology as all of psychology in Africa, about Africans, by Africans and non-Africans, the distinguishing and anchoring element of the framework is precisely this: African psychology is a set of repertoires tied to how we orient our studies, teaching and therapeutics to individuals in Africa, and, equally important, how we orient ourselves to the world from places in Africa. African psychology is, therefore, situated knowledge and practice.

    The main idea underpinning the framework is this: African psychology is composed of multiple orientations towards Africa and psychology. There are four orientations, distinguishable from each other by how you situate yourself with respect to psychology and Africa, to Africa in psychology (Ratele 2017a). The number of orientations is not definitive; the fact that there are several orientations is what matters.

    The four orientations that constitute African psychology are:

  • Euroamerican or Western-oriented African psychology;

  • psychological African studies;

  • value-based, spiritual, metaphysical, philosophical, or cultural African psychology (cultural African psychology for short); and

  • structural, materialist, political, or critical African psychology (critical African psychology for short).

    • Some of these orientations are readily graspable – such as the more Western-oriented psychology in Africa. As the mainstream, this Western-oriented African psychology is where the majority of psychologists are situated, and the literature produced from this orientation is too vast to reference. The other three orientations are represented by a handful of scholars (Mkhize 2004; Nwoye 2015; Semenya & Mokwena 2012).

  • 36 - It's African, except when it's not

  • 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 84-84

  • Summary

    The idea of African psychology appears to be a straightforward matter, I have said, except when it is not. And the latter, not the former, is usually the state of affairs.

    It may be easy to comprehend that all of psychology done in and for Africa, about Africans, by Africans as well as non- Africans (working on topics related to Africa and Africans) is of course African psychology. However, confusion is introduced when psychologists in Africa regard themselves as not African psychologists. It would seem logical that psychologists working in Europe are European psychologists. (Except, that is, those psychologists who hold Yemeni, Nigerian or Argentinian passports, or who identify with their birth countries outside of the European community even though they may have acquired citizenship of a European country, or who are stateless, or who live in other circumstances that could nullify the professional identity ‘European psychologist’.)

    Similarly, it would seem logical that psychologists working in Africa are African psychologists. Except that it is not. One explanation is that some psychology teachers, researchers and therapists simply do not identify with Africa. A lot of work is required to undo the miseducation that created such teachers, researchers and therapists. Others feel ambivalent about their own fortunes being tied to the fortune of Africa. Some hope exists that positive light can be cast on such ambivalence. Still others, especially students and younger psychologists, may be disoriented, fearful, or lack knowledge about Africa. Among the three explanations, this is the one in which the greatest hope for the future of African psychology is to be found.

  • 63 - In and of the world

  • 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 124-125

  • Summary

    Let me pose the question: can someone like Jan Christiaan Smuts be considered the father of African psychology? Because, I have suggested, many whites, even after generations of living in Africa, disavow or are excluded from the identity of African. Because African is confounded with blackness. The question of colonialism reappears: the colonialism in knowledge. The question of racism and its racialising effects in the development of disciplines. That is to say, in how racism turns some into whites and others into subordinate races. How are we then to think of fathers of knowledge fields in the context of colonial, racist and sexist domination and exclusion?

    In 1895 Jan Christiaan Smuts, a student at Oxford University and later twice prime minister of South Africa, completed a manuscript in which he analysed the personality of American poet Walt Whitman. Considered financially unviable for publication at the time, the manuscript ‘Walt Whitman: A study in the evolution of personality’ was eventually published in 1973 (Smuts 1973). Could Smuts be seen as the first father of African psychology?

    The answer to this question depends on, among other things, what is to be done with the racist roots of psychology in Africa. It depends, given a history in which ‘bastard’ offspring could be enslaved by their fathers, on how we want to think of white men who fathered African offspring. I am aware that whatever answer is given, it will not be unanimous. But I contend that Smuts did African psychology, if in passing, because of the mere fact that he lived in Africa. As to what kind of African psychology his study of Whitman was, that is a more interesting question.

    Nevertheless, here, then, in the picture of the young J.C. Smuts, a student at Oxford with a psychological interest in an American poet, is a sign: psychology students and psychologists from Africa have always been part of the world. They still are.

    In addition, psychology students and psychologists from other parts of the world have contributed to African psychology – even if that knowledge was not always for the good of the majority of people of the continent.

  • 12 - Overlooked perspectives

  • 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 29-30

  • Summary

    In an article with the title ‘“Too good to be real”: The obviously augmented breast in women's narratives of cosmetic surgery’, published in 2013 in the journal Gender & Society, Debra Gimlin writes that ‘in Westernised societies, no other aspect of women's embodiment is as scrutinized or as emblematic of femininity as breasts’ (2013: 918). What this otherwise interesting article appears unaware of are the complex ways in which women's breasts are perceived among groups such as young Swati and Zulu women, in eSwatini and South Africa. This complexity is tied to the idea of Westernisation. It may well be true that women's breasts are the most scrutinised parts of their bodies in Westernised societies. At the same time, the notion of ‘Westernised societies’ referred to in this case is not unpacked. Is the reference to countries in the West? To predominantly white countries? If the intention was to speak about all Westernised societies, which includes not only countries of the West but all those societies which were colonised by Europe and therefore Westernised, then the author has excluded several societies, including those in Africa, in which the discourse on women's embodiment and femininity is denser precisely because of the existence of more than one competing discourse on femininity; where society does borrow the fetishising narrative of the breast from the West but there is also a destabilisation of such fetishisation because the society has other narratives. How is this critique, which simultaneously dismisses a whole part of the world, to be read then? Some of what the author notes may actually apply to how women's bodies are regarded in countries that are excluded from the ‘Westernised societies’ referred to. Some does not apply. And the apparent ignorance on the part of some feminist scholars about how women's bodies and femininity are perceived in Westernised African societies is yet another call to feminist and other critical African female and male scholars to ‘write African femininities and masculinities’ for the world. Even if it is just one among thousands of instances, does this example not indicate the persistent need to understand society, the body and the psyche from African-centred perspectives?

  • 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.

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