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.

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).

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:

(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.)

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.

The place from which we come shapes our experience and the self. When the place has been severely disturbed and for a prolonged period, when our experiences of our place and the self in the world have been violently and extensively interrupted, we may get fixated with the place, with its past or future. We may want, for instance, to return so that we can repair the place, and in so doing restitch our experiences and the self. We may desire to go back to make the past better, however irrational the idea of repairing the past appears. We become obsessed with the future of the past, with tradition in the present. Many places in Africa are marked by repeated, sometimes continuous, violent interruptions of experiences and identities. Some Africans who live with these interruptions of experience, with the kind of historical trauma capable of reconfiguring identity, can and do become haunted by the trauma of the past. The past is too much in the present. The question of the past of Africa within modern life thus cannot but be drawn into debates on African knowledge broadly and African psychology more specifically. Yet, while the questions related to what is African about African psychology are almost ineluctable, it would be incorrect to claim that African psychology has failed because it seems to be obsessed with the issues of who is African or with the past. That is to say, that African psychology cannot help us survive modern life, that it is anti-modern (or at best not modern enough). As I have said, African psychology has been around since the nineteenth century and is arguably thriving.

What troubles African psychology, and might make us see failure where there is a complicated history but also wellestablished African psychology departments, is of course imbricated with the fixation with what it means to be African, and yet it is surely also an aftermath of the lack of clarity regarding what African psychology is. The question of definition is unavoidable. It trips up many. Definitional issues are never fully resolved. African is irretrievably marked by coloniality, an immersive phenomenon. Europe is still in Africa. African psychology exemplifies the profound entanglement of colonial conquest.

Today, there may be a constitutional right to education in many countries in Africa. Throughout history, across Africa and in other parts of the world, men and women in church groups, political organisations, social movements, or as individuals have agitated for education. This right to education is absolutely important to treasure, especially given that there are still countries where education is not a right, or where, even though it is a right, obvious structural barriers exist that prevent some groups from gaining access to it. If you are poor, for instance, what you get may or may not be what you need or want. A great deal of what you get does not amount to much when it comes to learning how to live with self-esteem, pride, love, purpose and meaning. Poverty ought not to undermine the right to education, but where education is commoditised it does limit your educational choices as far as quality is concerned.

To overcome the effects of a dehumanising history, not merely in order to be rich but to learn to live a life full of significance, even if your parents were poor and unschooled – that's exactly what you won't get from the right to education if your teachers don't care for the whole of you as a person. You are more than just your brain or your body.

Even though I acknowledge the imperative of affirming education as a legal human right, I am struck by the fact that there is rarely ever an ethical obligation for those who look after the education of the young to ascertain that they are well taught. To be taught well can mean many things. To someone like me, keeping the notion of African-centredness in mind, it means that African children and young people, and all others who wish to study, are educated such that they will enjoy a meaningful life after their education. It means that they are taught how to be free, if they live in a country that has endured years of dehumanisation and oppression. It means that they learn how to live-with-others (this lesson on living-with-others being concerned with the values of botho referred to earlier), if their society is one in which living apart from ‘others’ was for a long time a way of life.

Being-Black-in-the-World is intended as a contribution to the growing body of books and papers on the black experience. It is only very recently that concerted efforts have become manifest in the field of black studies at various universities in Africa and elsewhere. The extent of academic and lay interest in this field received concrete expression in the publication by Heinemann Educational Books in 1970 of a three-volume source book entitled The African Experience, which was edited by J.N. Paden and E.W. Soja.

The efforts of these academics are definitely deserving of our guarded admiration, although it is probably true to say that the most important contribution on the black experience will have to come from Africa. For it is here, on the African continent, where the great and intricate drama of being-black-in-the-world is taking place. In a field of study and life where there have been so many self-proclaimed experts, it is not always possible to say much that is worth saying. It is partly for this reason that I conceived of this book as essentially a small collection of essays reflecting my thinking on a number of subjects.

There has been no desire on my part to impose any form of structural unity on the book. To impose a structure would have been to tell an unpardonable lie, since my existence and experience are themselves fairly unstructured. The only formal structural requirements I attempted to adhere to are those relating to the internal consistency of the individual essays. This means that each essay has been an attempt to reflect on a specific aspect of the black experience. Overlapping with respect to theme reflects the writer's conviction that experience is not discrete but continuous.

This collection of essays addresses itself to a limited number of important questions. I consider the questions to be of general significance to South African society as a whole. Issues which are of such significance should be of interest to both academics and members of the lay public. It became necessary to keep this fact in view in the treatment of the various subjects in the collection. Technical terminology was reduced to a minimum in the more demanding essays. A glossary was considered necessary for purposes of clarity. Consideration of the collection as a whole revealed that there were enough questions raised for both the academically inclined and the general reader.

My search for how to see from Africa, authentically, had been going on for fifteen years when I received the Psychology and Social Change Award from Rhodes University. Or at least, that's what I said to my audience when I gave my lecture at the university. But this is off by decades. The search had begun almost immediately after the first lecture I attended as a psychology student. I still remember when I learned that black children, like white children, tend to prefer white dolls. I would come to know the names of the researchers who made this discovery: the black American psychologists Kenneth Clark (1914–2005) and Mamie Clark (1917–1983). To summarise their findings in one sentence, the doll-preference studies were simply showing that black children preferred and identified with whiteness more than blackness.

In 1955 Kenneth Clark published the book Prejudice and Your Child. His intended audience appears to have been black (or as black Americans were referred to then, Negro) parents. Here is an extract from the book:

The question I had when I came across the Clarks’ original studies (Clark & Clark 1939a, 1939b, 1940, 1950) was, could this be true for South Africa?

To observe that psychology in Africa has been influenced by Euroamerican presuppositions, notions and morals is not an argument for a Euroamerican-centred psychology in Africa. Of course not. I am against precisely the wholesale importation of Euroamerican-centric ideologies, explanations, ways of seeing, values, norms and ways of being, conveyed in psychology, and their imposition upon the ways of living of the Others of white, capitalist, middle-class America and Western Europe.

At the same time, to argue against a psychology that centres Euroamerican presuppositions and ways of living in itself – although these may be thinly concealed by questions, theories, models and approaches that claim to be universal while privileging Western European and American ways of knowing, being, and relating to others – is not to be interpreted as a call to expunge all foreign ideas from African psychology. This would be an impossible task. Euroamericanism is in us. And some of its ideas are definitely worth keeping. Augustine Nwoye (2017: 44) has contended that ‘although some Eurocentric theories of the human personality or personhood … already exist, including those developed by some African American psychologists … some of which are very relevant to our experience, a continental African version of the theory of African human personhood is still needed’.

All psychologists in African countries, but in particular Africa-centring psychologists, ought to assert their right to, and avail themselves of, the European archive. It is common knowledge that Africa's encounter with Europe from the fifteenth century onwards forever changed both continents. Additionally, European civilisation contains property and ideas stolen from Africa and the New World. Most significant for African psychology, however, is the pronounced need for more interchanges, and more openness to influencing each other, across African countries. In this respect, mobility between different countries and exchanges among continental psychology students, researchers, teachers and therapists are necessary. Beyond such intra-African exchanges, African psychologists need to interact with African psychologists in the diaspora. And African psychologists must produce psychology for the world, not only for Africa.

More than eight years ago the Psychology Department of Rhodes University initiated an award to honour prominent members of the psychology community in South Africa for their contribution to social change in various fields of practice. The Psychology and Social Change Award is intended to

The first person to receive the award was Noel Chabani Manganyi. Aesthete, quiet yet incisive political observer, university leader, educationalist, and of course eminent psychologist, Manganyi would have been my choice, too, for an award such as this. And for many others – if we had them.

The man has had many achievements in his long life. However, it is the numerous adversities he has confronted and overcome that seem to have shaped him, as someone with an irrepressible point of view in a world that not only repressed men and women like him, but as often jailed, banned, or killed those, like him, who stood against apartheid. As for achievements in the field of psychology, Manganyi was the first to plant a seed for the growth of a psychology of black being. Over a period of just under two decades, in addition to numerous academic articles, he published his ideas in several books concerning blackness and racism. Among the works in his oeuvre are Being-Black-in-the- World (1973), Alienation and the Body in Racist Society: A Study of the Society that Invented Soweto (1977a), Mashangu's Reverie, and Other Essays (1977b), Looking through the Keyhole: Dissenting Essays on the Black Experience (1981) and Treachery and Innocence: Psychology and Racial Difference in South Africa (1991). How incredible is it that Manganyi's work does not form the core of the ‘psychology of race and racism’ curriculum?

Why, though, I have to remind myself once again, would we expect all black psychologists to understand and love black-centred and African-centred psychology – unless we are once again tripped up by the racist belief that all blacks think alike, feel alike, even if they do not look like?

Where we are seduced into expecting that all black psychologists will be keen on psychology that centres blacks, the corollary is that all white psychologists represent white supremacist Euroamerican-centred psychology. This is not borne out by my experience. There are many white allies who support pluriversal (which is not the same as universal), world-centred ways of knowing and knowledges, and oppose an oppressive knowledge that privileges supremacist whiteness.

The implication? It takes a certain political and ethical consciousness, not race, to grasp the global flows of knowledge, the relations between power and knowledge.

My search for Africa in psychology was a search for a more welcoming home, a community for myself and later on for my students. What I found about Africa in psychology was ignorance, stereotypes, a dismissal of a whole continent of people in a sentence, or complete silence. When Africa was mentioned, it was an Africa neither I nor my students recognised. We could not relate. Partly because of this ignorance, absence, stereotyping and unrelatability, partly because it is really up to African scholars to write about the world from Africa as much as about Africa for the world, I gradually turned away from psychology towards studies on men and masculinities. From 2004 to 2007 my university formally agreed that I could divide my time between its Psychology Department and the Women's and Gender Studies Programme.

But for my own sanity I needed to draw the disparate elements of my work into a more coherent whole, with less jarring contradictions. Doing so was necessary to my health, and to the efficient use of my time and energy. I had to trace a clear connecting thread between psychology and masculinity. Searching for a home did not only mean finding a single university department or centre to contain my intellectual interests. It also meant trying to find what could be referred to as a disalienated identity, a certain way of being in (a) place where I would feel less like an interloper, less like an outsider; a way of being part of the world while being African. Specifically with respect to the question of Africa in psychology, it was a search for a way to be at home in a global psychology that is overwhelmingly dominated by US and Western European explanations, tools, concepts, therapeutic models and findings, and therefore can make someone who lives in an African country feel alienated. It is especially important to recognise that this was a search for a way of being black and yet ordinarily entitled, for want of a better concept, for I wanted the best and worst of all worlds. I like being black, but even in conditions where blackness becomes salient I am first and last always a man, not twice a man because of what men of my skin colour are enabled to see, and by no means half a man because of the history they have endured.