DYLAN VALLEY & BISO MATHA RIALGO

In 2021, Kopano Ratele was invited by Aryan Kaganof, the editor of herri, to contribute something on African psychology to Issue #6 of the “online journal”. The theme of the Issue was the twelve-tone composer Graham Newcater. Music on all sides, then.

Ratele had just arrived at Stellenbosch University in July of that year. He has said that a motivation to join to Stellenbosch was that though he had supervised postgraduate students over the years who had done African-centred psychological work, he had always felt an urge, a strange sort of political vitality, which he sees to be opposed to a jaded academic objective, to return and teach African psychology to undergraduates. He returned to teaching, and it is telling that he chose Stellenbosch, two years after the notorious journal article Age- and education-related effects on cognitive functioning in Coloured South African women by five “mamparas” (as the Sunday Times referred to them), namely Sharné Nieuwoudt, Kasha Elizabeth Dickie, Carla Coetsee, Louise Engelbrecht and Elmarie Terblanche, academics and students based at Stellenbosch University’s Department of Exercise, Sport, and Lifestyle Medicine.

Ratele says that even prior to Kaganof’s invitation, he was thrown by the ‘online journal’. He could not fully understand what herri is. That is the reason for the quotation marks; to refer to herri as an online journal is a somewhat a misnaming, as you will quickly realise if you visit what Kaganof refers to as the “herriverse”. Anyhow, there was an attractive energy to herri, Ratele says, and it reminded him of Chimurenga, founded by Ntone Edjabe and first published in 2002. But herri was born and would live as an online creation.

There was also some puzzlement around why the editor of a journal focused largely on music would want a contribution on African psychology. What in the world does African psychology have to do with music, it would not be a preposterous question (for anybody else except those interested in the narrow field of “psychology of music”) to ask?

Sure, there is “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” – meaning the spirituals and folk songs we come to associate with enslaved Africans in the American South; and there is gospel, the blues, jazz and conscious hip-hop. Sure there is Afrobeats – and before that there was Fela and his Afrobeat – that Nigeria has given the world, and which right now is turning the world. Sure there is isicathamiya, mbaqanga, kwaito and, right now amapiano making the world twist itself. Sure, music may be the highest form of art, some say, and Africa seems to have inexhaustible wells of this art. But nobody is writing about the music in which the souls of Africans is soaked, even when that soul is confronted by death. Somebody is yet to tell us why African people sing so much, so searingly and so beautifully at funerals, right to the edge of the grave. 

OK, it seems there is much that those who speak of African and black psychology can get from listening to African and black music. That oughtn’t be to mimic how Euroamerican centric disciplines develop by proliferating narrower and narrower specialities, and establish another sub-sub-speciality called African psychology of music (or, god forbid, something called psychology of African music.) No, the soul is always in need of music. Music reaches what words are unable to prise open. We make music and dance and listen to it because the soul that does not hear music turns into a desert.  

It may still not be very clear what perplexed Ratele so in the invitation from Kaganof. You must understand what herri is, though. This is what Kaganof has said:

“The online archival publication herri gives expression to an ethics and aesthetics of scholarly and artistic engagement. It positions South African music as the central point of reference for a politics of thinking and writing and creating. herri is conceived of as a living archive that demonstrates the possibilities of post-new media and integrated technologies where discrete categories like “art”, “music”, “film”, “text” and “design” all merge into sensorial and informational abundance. Initiated in 2019 as part of the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Delinking Encounters project at Stellenbosch University, herri developed into an investigation about how the notion of decolonisation and decoloniality impacts on the archive, and in its ten iterations to date, has demonstrated how the archive is dispersed between artefacts, living people and their memories, and artistic imaginings of the past, present and future. herri is foundationally built upon the notion of open access, and is freely available online to anybody”.

The word “text” above can be read to include texts written by academics, journalists, poets, and others who write. Alongside “art”, and “music”, and “film”, and “text”, and “design”, you can insert “scholarship”; and, why, indeed, we could very well have psychoneuroimmunologists, political scientists, and palaeontologists writing for herri.   

All the same, when Ratele’s uncertainty about the reason a largely music-focused publication would carry a contribution on African psychology subsided, an article was produced. herri published What Use Would White Students Have For African Psychology in the Newcater issue. And accompanying the piece was music for white and black students and their teachers to chant while going through the article: “Psychology” from the Dead Prez. That song comes from the album, “Let’s get free”, which came out in the year 2000. If you have listened to “Psychology” and still not sure why students in a country like South Africa have to think from the point of view of being-in-Africa, you must listen to “I’m a African” on the same album, which includes the lyric “I’m black like Steve Biko”.

That’s the short story how Ratele got hooked on herri. And that’s how, I understand, a few months later in 2022, the idea for an issue of herri on African psychology germinated. 

The African Psychology issue of herri, issue #10, is, I suspect, like nothing psychology students, teachers, and researchers, anywhere in the world, have read. There is the music, of course: from ZANLA forces war songs, Njabulo Phungula’s art music, Ntemi Piliso and African Jazz Pioneers, Nduduzo Makhathini playing “You’re in chains too” – and a mix, the real human person, by Lerato “Lavas” Mlambo. There are essays, and fiction, and poetry – everywhere, from Aakriti Kuntal, Khulile Nxumalo, Shafinaaz Hassim, Mphutlane wa Bofelo (ten poems), Lesego Rampolokeng meditating on Linton Kwesi Johnson, and several others. So these and other contributions make up the company which the texts that explicitly reference African psychology keep in herri 10. What the editors were seeking to do then was offer herri and its future-looking possibilities of no longer so new media and integration of technologies as a platform for sustained engagement with African psychology. But they were also seeking to put African psychological work in conversations with art, music, literature, and reflections on actual existing life.

But, at the end of this, I want to mention the films commissioned for the special issue of herri. There are two of these. There is one by Paul Khahliso. It’s titled “Against colonial psychology”. You should watch that.

And then there is the work of Dylan Valley and his students and collaborators to which I wish to draw your very special attention. What is so special about it? The short film touches on something that you may have felt at some point. It often remains unnamed. It is not yet a disease, however, strangely, it has been referred to as an epidemic in some countries like the United States.

The epidemic that is not a disease is loneliness.

The idea that is seeded in the film is that one might come to recognise that the shroud in which we not-so-suddenly find ourselves enveloped is larger than loneliness, and more noxious, and too deep in some of us. That is the shroud of individualism. The belief that I come(s) first, that ultimately we don’t need others, that you make it on your own, is, ironically, a fundamental idea the atomising, white, Euroamerican-centric psychology has long supported (at times even championed).

Individualism is what lies at the lonely, disconnected heart of contemporary social life loved by Westerners.

In Valley’s film we begin to see the beginning of the return to another way of thinking about life, of how to understand the world around and in us. In touching on loneliness, the film opens a fertile space to return to a world that gives birth to connectedness as an essential aspect of the human psyche. In doing so, we suddenly realise what a culturally-embedded African psychology, perhaps even an indigenous African psychology, is capable of doing, of healing.