KOPANO RATELE AND SOPHIA SANAN

AVREQ, May 8, 2024

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The question to begin with is, how do you teach with love – a lecture hall in which the majority of your students are young white people – about the radical potential of an African psychology for them too?

Let me state this in another way.

How does one inculcate in white (and black) students, in the best way possible, this simple idea: Stellenbosch University is on the African continent and not a département of an imaginary European country?

The intention behind this question is my desire for students to take in and work through the colonial and racist history and knowledge that constituted them as individuals, the groups with which they identify and these places called “Stellenbosch” and “South Africa”. The hope is that as critical awareness about how they come to be who they are as well as how Stellenbosch and South Africa come to be what they are today they also unlearn a few foetid and bigoted ideas they may have inherited with their schooling. In particular, I hope that they may come to unlearn the supremacist complexes of being European deposited in them; they may dump the notion of white as the standard human; they may start to see that what Africa needs are not saviours or aid but fair rules and nonexploitative relations with the rich parts of the world; and they may unlearn that the idea of Africans as less than human is directly linked to the persistence of coloniality and racism.

For three years now, as I have taught classes on African psychology I have, at moments, felt like a decolonial trickster, trying to overcome the lessons of the colonial fathers and mothers of my discipline at this university, whose spirits still haunt our racialised identities and what we teach and publish in my discipline.

Why teach African psychology? Why teach it here? And how can a professor who teaches African psychology not just overcome the ingrained whiteness psychology here, where the white fathers (and to a lesser extent white mothers) of the discipline) were so prejudiced against Africans?

What I teach in my African psychology class begins with radical questioning. This is the kind of questioning that is integrated into a definition of African psychology that diverges from how scholars like Augustine Nwoye and Seth Oppong, who recently passed away, define African psychology. This is questioning of white, Western-centric psychology as well as question of African psychology as only focused on Africans or Africa.

Consider what Nwoye has said. African psychology is, he said, ‘the systematic and informed study of the complexities of human mental life, culture and experience in the pre- and post-colonial African world’ (Nwoye 2014, p. 57). In my view this is limited. African psychology cannot be restricted to Africa.

Oppong uses this term pan-African psychology but says it can be used interchangeably with African psychology and Indigenous Psychology in Africa. All the same, he said that pan-African psychology is ‘a branch of psychology where the population of interest is persons of African origin, and/or where the target population resides either on the continent of Africa or in the Diaspora’ (Oppong 2016, p. 10). I have dealt with elsewhere, a piece I titled Frequently asked questions about African psychology, but it bears repeating. African psychology is not a psychology that studies Africans. This is a counter-intuitive, fruitful, and indeed very decolonial line of thought to which I am pointing.

In contrast to the ways scholars like Nwoye and Oppong, both of whom are proponents of African-centred psychology, there is a third way which we can see Africa psychology. I find this to be more productive – for all kinds of reasons.

Simply stated, African psychology is, at the most basic, an orientation to the world and self.

It looks at not only African people and their cognitive, emotional and behavioural lives. African psychology studies people’s lives, people of the world, from a place in Africa.

I have written about what I call the four orientations within African psychology. This framework has been taken up by other scholars in generative and not so helpful ways. All the same, what I want to emphasise here though is that this framework is not an end in itself but rather a heuristic of thinking about how to imagine and do African psychology. The number of orientations do not really matter as much as their plurality idea. One implication of that is that, if there is more than one way to approach psychological issues and the world, if you were to change your orientation, you see different things; if you change what you pay attention to, you are likely to change; if you shift your perspective, different interpretations become possible.

Fig. 1: Four orientations in African psychology (Ratele, 2017a)

My perspective about what African psychology is and what it is not, as well as how to approach projects from being situated in a place in Africa, is informed by reading across and paying attention to what is happening in other disciplines. The arts are a rich source of inspiration and learning. Take, for example, the work of Johannes Phokela. There is this thing in Phokela’s visual language which I find very entrancing and unsettling, all at once. Precisely because some of the work can discompose the viewer, whether one is a Westerner or African, when it is found out that the artist behind the work is African, I find Phokela’s work worthy of study for looking at the world and looking at where we are located as making works of art or science. His art work, or shall I say his way seeing, undoes a certain way of thinking about Africans, a way that tends to exoticise and fossilise Africa and its people. I must quickly state there are many absolutely amazing contemporary African artists, working in different forms of art, that are terrific. And I believe African psychologists and students of psychology will find these artists worthy of learning from as regards how to see the world, how to (re)make the world around them, and how to see the self, how to be themselves, and, if the need arises, how to remake the self. By the way, there is also much to learn from African artists, as well as artists from other parts of the world, about many topics usually thought to be the competency of psychology, such as consciousness, cognition, emotions, mental health, prejudice, perception, and even the individual. The African artists I have in mind, who range across the art disciplines, include individuals like Sthembiso Sibisi, Gregory Maqoma, El Anatsui, Rich Mnisi, Mandisi Dyantis, Francis Essoua (aka Enfant Précoce), Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Nasty C, Abongile Sidzumo, Thebe Magugu, Ballake Cissoko, Carlos Idun-Tawiah, and many more.

To return to Phokela, the South African political heads in exile may have said to him that his art is, as he put it, politically unsound. What is politically sound art? Art that has the stamp of approval? Approved by whom, though?

I declare that I am on the side of the artist who makes politically unsound art, that one who makes art that doesn’t give a f-art, meaning unsettling and yet freeing art. The artist who refuses to be pigeon-holed into ruling ways of thinking, feeling, seeing and making is your friend. They are certainly mine.

But, why, specifically, is Phokela’s art politically unsound? I think it is because the world of his paintings troubles how we see the world and ourselves – and deeply so. He disregards the constricting categories of African and other (art) in his work. The art work says, if I may, the artist is a universal figure. And so, besides the ineffable affects that I personally experience every time I look at it, I consider a piece of work such as As the Old Sing, so the Young Pipe (1998), which I saw a while ago, and which is possibly one my favourite pieces of art because of its unusability for hegemonic political discourse, a very important ‘lesson’ in seeing differently. I mean that what the work makes me feel is beyond simple words, so what I shall say will always be inadequate. And yet I can see that the perspective of seeing, and indeed the way of the artist of being in the world, apparent in such a piece of art is what likely disorients anyone who thinks in binaries, anyone who wants the world to be neatly categorizable. The work can generate onto-epistemological vertigo in the essentialist.

I have asked myself, as I suspect many have asked, is what Phokela does African art? If it is not, what kind of art is it? If it is African art, what, then, is African in this art work?

In my reading, Phokela turns the world of Europe and Africa, white and black, as well as the word of art itself, inside out. He displaces the white artist’s gaze with his own way of seeing. But not in a simple way. He looks at the same object or events that the white artists saw or sees, and throws the European artist out, and yet you cannot read him as simply an African artist mimicking the Europeans. I think what he does is to show how to see both from heres (plural: the many places from which he learns to look) and elsewheres (being wherever he travels and learn from). He is not merely saying, ‘see, I too can do this shit if I want to’. He is also not saying to me, as I stand in front of his work, ‘I, a black artist, made this work; respect the black messiah’. He is saying, to the art world, in spite of European art history which for a long time banished the African artist to the margins of the art world, ghettoising him, ‘I am nothing but an artist’. And to me he says, I feel, ‘you may experience unsteadiness to suddenly be transported to the status of a god, but shouldn’t you experience the world from above just as you have done from below, from there as well as from here.’ What I came to understand is, then, that whatever is human, however politically unsound, belongs to all of us. When I say, The world looks like this from here, I am saying ways of seeing are imbricated with places. However, there is no essential African way of apprehending the world. Here can be there, or over there, or anywhere from which look at the world and yourself.

The answer to the question is this African art is, then, for me, absolutely. And of course, not. This is art.

That question, is this African art, parallels the question I have grappled in regarding African psychology. In defining African psychology as a way of seeing, an orientation, I came to also learn that I entered the company of a small company of philosophers who refused the idea of Africa as a place characterised only by ethnophilosophy, a collective philosophy. In the same way, African psychology is not ethnopsychology, psychology of Africans, culture psychology or folk psychology, certainly not only these.

The prime example of these philosophers is Paulin Hountondji, whose book African philosophy: myth or reality, published in 1970, is enduringly buttressing for me in my thinking about African psychology. The book is also essential reading for anyone who would want to think about how to think from a place in Africa – a part of the ball floating in space. But there are others like Kwasi Wiredu, Tsenay Serequeberhan and Henry Odera Oruka.

What do I mean African psychology is an orientation? African psychology is a way of seeing the world. By seeing I mean more that the literal act of turning your gaze or paying attention to what you pay attention to. I mean thinking about the world and the self, or for our purpose here, imagining the world and the self from particular a place and time. When I learn to look again, to see if I can see differently, I feel I am also enabled to situate the work (a work of art, a novel, a theory, a practice, mine, others’) in its full and proper context and to understand differently.

I mentioned the colonial. There is a non-incidental connection between decolonial thought and the way I think of African psychology. Along with the decolonial collective I work with, and former students and others colleagues, I have sought to make this as clear I can.

Here, for example, is what Nick Malherbe and I have said in 2022 (I will leave this extract here and not read it):

We wish to make clear what is meant by African psychology when it is grounded in and aimed at what the Puerto Rican thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2017) refers to as a decolonial attitude. The axis of such a psychology is not psychology’s disciplinary demands and dictums, nor is its audience only psychologists and their students. This kind of psychology, which takes Africa as its centre of epistemic gravity, is also not characterised by a quest to define Africa’s definitive theoretical or representational co-ordinates. Nor does it endeavour to “return” to a precolonial fantasy of Africa. Rather, a decolonising African psychology (i.e., a critical and creative project to decolonise psychology as well as Africa) looks to prioritise decolonising sociopolitical struggles that occur in, with, from, and—crucially—for Africa. A decolonising African psychology must, therefore, be shaped by, held accountable to, and formed through the complex politics of those engaged in decolonial struggle.

If, as psychologists, we take psychology’s disciplinary legitimacy, rather than existing decolonial struggle, as our reference point, we risk our work being recuperated into coloniality’s matrices of domination.

If you understand that what we call psychology, without adjective, and its concomittant therapeutic culture, are intended to assimilate one into the world supported by hegemonic colonial EuroAmericancentred global order: If you truly understand that part; you might begin to see that what we call African psychology, in the strict sense, cannot be merely a version, mirror, subdiscipline, or exotic corner of the EuroAmerican psychology world.

In his article, ‘Coloniality and modernity/rationality’, Anibal Quijano (2007) describes the violent process of producing of the EuroAmericancentred global political economic order in which we live. That order began, he says, ‘with the conquest of the societies and the cultures which inhabit what today is called Latin America’ and extended to the whole planet. Quijano notes that ‘Western’ European dominators and their Euro-North American descendants are still the principal beneficiaries’ of the Eurocentred colonialism, together with the ruling classes of some non-European parts of the world. ‘The exploited and the dominated of Latin America and Africa are the main victims.’ He then writes:

‘in spite of the fact that political colonialism has been eliminated, the relationship between the European – also called ‘Western’ – culture, and the others, continues to be one of colonial domination. It is not only a matter of the subordination of the other cultures to the European, in an external relation; we have also to do with a colonization of the other cultures, albeit in differing intensities and depths. This relationship consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination, in a sense, it is a part of it.’^{[1]Quijano, Aníbal (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21 (2) 168 – 178}

It is common knowledge that Europe interrupted the development and internal dynamics of African art and art making, but more than that, stole it, borrowed from it, denigrated it, celebrated it, stereotyped it, used it, hid it, exoticised it, delegitimised it, put it in its museums and galleries and did everything and all – except to leave it alone.

As Quijano writes, ‘what the Europeans did was to deprive Africans of legitimacy and recognition in the global cultural order dominated by European patterns. The former was confined to the category of the ‘exotic’. That is, doubtless, what is manifested, for example, in the utilization of the products of African plastic expression as motive, starting point, source of inspiration for the art of Western or Europeanized African artists, but not as a mode of artistic expression of its own, of a rank equivalent to the European norm. And that exactly identifies a colonial view.’

African psychology in the way I define it is a refusal to assimilate to that colonial view of Africa, to accommodate us to the abnormality of the world as it exists.

If I still have time, I would like to say something, a sort of a story about a writer, a black writer who probably never visited Africa (I actually do not know) but whose race conects him to this place. It links these ideas of colonised imagination and colonial view to a certain restrictive way of thinking about black and African identities.

This is sort of what I said in entry 39 of my book, Why men hurt women, but I am adding and moving things around:

It is common for societies to erect boundaries, one can even say invisible prison-like walls, around the identities they create. There are invisible but very real borders around identities such as being black, a woman, white, African, straight, and adult. By this I mean that if you are an adult, say, it is expected, even demanded, that you not behave like a child, even if the playfulness associated with child-like behaviour may be good for your psychological health and body, at least once in a while. Or, if you are a white person, you are not supposed to behave like black people, whatever that means. It is therefore inevitable that a certain restrictiveness is, shall we say, built-in into Africanness or black masculinity as identities. To be successfully masculine black, for instance, by which I meaning hegemonically so, you have to stay inside the prison walls, not act queer or feminine or white.

A few months before I wrote down these ideas, I had read a terrific essay by Teju Cole. That essay sent me to read the essay by James Baldwin that Cole was writing about.

In his essay on Baldwin, Cole writes about this very kind of restrictiveness: the limitations imposed on those of us in black skins. But this applies, as I have just said, to other identities as well. The essay by Cole is about the time the gay black stranger, Baldwin, who was already famous, first went to a white town, Leukerbad in Switzerland, in 1951. For two weeks, Baldwin stayed at his lover Lucien Happersberger’s family chalet in a village up in the mountains and wrote the essay Stranger in the Village. If you have not read this, or anything by Baldwin, this essay, along with My dungeon shook: Letter to my nephew on the one hundredth anniversary of the emancipation are two essays YOU. MUST. READ before you die.

This is how Baldwin begins Stranger in the village:

From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village; I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a “sight” outside of the city. It did not occur to me – possibly because I am an American – that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.

In this way Baldwin leads you, lulls you, mentioning what’s available in this village. And then, a few paragraphs down, like an experienced judo master, he flips you.

He says:

That first summer I stayed two weeks and never intended to return. But I did return in the winter, to work; the village offers, obviously, no distractions whatever and has the further advantage of being extremely cheap. Now it is winter again, a year later, and I am here again. Everyone in the village knows my name, though they scarcely ever use it, knows that I come from America though, this, apparently, they will never really believe: black men come from Africa – and everyone knows that I am the friend of the son of a woman who was born here, and that I am staying in their chalet. But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.

From here on, between the beauty of the writing and the experience that Baldwin details, the pain is exquisite.

Cole obviously admires Baldwin, just as I do. But he has an issue with the writer. He says he is puzzled by this amazing writer’s self-abnegation in the face of the art of a Rembrandt, Dante, Bach, Shakespeare, or the cathedral at Chartres.

He is puzzled because Baldwin understood that the blues are not below Bach.

Who believes European classic music is better than jazz?

What Cole is remarking on is this passage by Baldwin:

For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory -but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

Cole says he will not surrender the beauty of any great art. But, as he says, ‘there was a certain narrowness in received ideas of black culture in the nineteen-fifties.’^{[2]Teju Cole, ‘Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village”’, New Yorker, 19 August 2014.} Despite knowing how European colonialism has violently extracted all kinds of resources (including knowledge and art) from the colonised world while destroying native lives, livelihoods and artist’s work, closing oneself off from any great art from anywhere in the world, including Europe and North America, is an error. I have learned to engage with European and African art from a different angle, with this very idea of stolen and supressed knowledge and art in mind. I strongly encourage anyone who would listen, to do so.

Cole’s idea of a received restrictiveness applies so well in this place to how and what we become – for instance, men, black, able-bodied, students, white, queer. I do not know when we are ever men and not part of a given culture. And from the other end, of course, there is never a moment when we are just part of a cultural group and not part of a gender group.

We are always more than any one thing at any moment, although the situation can make one kind of identity more salient than another.

All the same, there is a certain conventional constriction in affects, attitudes and acts when we consider what we are allowed – and allow ourselves – to feel as men and women, as black and white, as queer and non-queer. Included here are the positions we hold (for example, regarding marriage) and what we do in our lives as members of the gender category with which we identify. It is this narrowness that a person needs to loosen in himself, if he is to be a different person than the category he is thrown into.
 

This piece is an expanded version of a talk first presented at the Centre for the Afterlife of Violence and Reparative Quest (AVREQ), Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, May 8, 2024.