KOPANO RATELE in dialogue with ARYAN KAGANOF

Kopano Ratele: I have been searching for and compiling a list of definitions of African psychology. It will be useful to present a set of definitions of African psychology so as to orientate readers. There are many definitions of this project. I have decided to list ten.

The diversity of definitions of African psychology can be regarded as an indication of the exciting debates inside of Africa(n)-centering knowledge circles. That this is so points to a rich future. That there is efflorescence here, people might say.

However, I feel the multiplicity of definitions can be a problem. It is concerning to me, admittedly. What it suggests is that we are kept busy defining the field instead of finding, generating and advancing the hundreds if not thousands of ways to enable people to have healthier, more meaningful, richer and happier lives; distracted from doing the thousands of empirical studies that we need to conduct; preoccupied with defining our identity when we should be generating the thousands of concepts to help us understand the world from here. One of the things racism is adept at is in distracting us, keeping us busy. So this preoccupation with defining what African psychology is can be partly attributed to how racism and colonialism work, keeping us busy searching for our identities.

What this preoccupation also suggest is that we have yet to agree on a widely accepted definition. Reaching some consensus is utterly important.

Anyhow, here are Ten Definitions of African Psychology presented from the most recent to the earliest. A person may choose what they find to be the most appropriate for their work.

I define African Psychology as a holistic understanding of wellness which draws from context specific African ways of being and doing that understand human existence from a relational ontology. African Psychology allows the people of Africa to rely on their own definition of human functioning which draws from their understanding of the meaning of being human. Being human for African people of abantu cultures means to be umntu which is not a mere denotation of biological existence. Being umntu/motho is an ethical standard above and beyond being a biological phenomenon. Ethical standard means upholding the prescripts of the way of being of abantu which is Isintu. Isintu is a culture that draws from the concept of ubuntu and … communicates the interconnection between individuals and the world around them.

Zethu Cakata, 2023.^{[1]The place of indigenous African languages in the new curriculum: an African psychology case study. South African Journal of Higher Education, 37(3), 43-58. 2023.}

African Psychology should be understood as an orientation that adopts a culture-conscious approach to the selection of research questions, design, data analysis, and interpretation of results.

Seth Oppong, 2022.^{[2]Indigenous psychology in Africa: Centrality of culture, misunderstandings, and global positioning. Theory & Psychology, 32(6), 953-973.}

Afrikan Psychology does not refer to the application of Western-derived theories and tools/tests in non-Western contexts. Rather, it is a complex, theory-building exercise. It is grounded on indigenous philosophies, histories, epistemologies, ontology, and axiology arising from the Nile Valley civilisations.

Nhlanhla Mkhize, 2021.^{[3] African/Afrikan-centered psychology. South African Journal of Psychology, 51(3), 422-429.}

Black/African Centered psychology is a dynamic manifestation of unifying African principles, values and traditions. It is the self-conscious “centering” of psychological analyses and applications in African realities, cultures, and epistemologies. Black/African Centered psychology, as a system of thought and action, examines the processes that allow for the illumination and liberation of the Spirit. Relying on the principles of harmony within the universe as a natural order of existence, Black/African Centered psychology recognizes: the Spirit that permeates everything that is; the notion that everything in the universe is interconnected; the value that the collective is the most salient element of existence; and the idea that communal selfknowledge is the key to mental health. Black/African Centered psychology is ultimately concerned with understanding the systems of meaning of human beingness, the features of human functioning, and the restoration of normal/natural order to human development. As such, it is used to resolve personal and social problems and to promote optimal functioning.

Association of Black Psychologists, 2019.^{[4]Black/African-centered psychology.}

African psychology refers to ways of situating oneself in the field of psychology in relation to and from Africa.

Kopano Ratele, 2017.^{[5]Frequently asked questions about African psychology. South African Journal of Psychology, 47(3), 273-279.}

African psychology can be taken to refer to the systematic and informed study of the complexities of human mental life, culture and experience in the pre- and post-colonial African world.

Augustine Nwoye, 2014.^{[6]African psychology, critical trends. In, Teo, T. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of critical psychology, 57-65. Springer Reference.}

African-centered psychology is concerned with defining African psychological experiences from an African perspective, a perspective that reflects an African orientation to the meaning of life, the world, and relationships with others and one’s self.

Cheryl Grills, 2002.^{[7]African-centered psychology: Basic principles. In T. A. Parham (Eds.), Counseling persons of African descent: Raising the bar of practitioner competence, pp. 10-24. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.}

Black/African-centered psychology is a dynamic manifestation of unifying African principles, values and traditions. It is the self-conscious “centering” of psychological analyses and applications in African realities, cultures, and epistemologies. Black/African-centered psychology, as a system of thought and action, examines the processes that allow for the illumination and liberation of the Spirit. Relying on the principles of harmony within the universe as a natural order of existence, Black/African-centered psychology recognizes: the Spirit that permeates everything that is; the notion that everything in the universe is interconnected; the value that the collective is the most salient element of existence; and the idea that communal self knowledge is the key to mental health.

Thomas Parham, Joseph White, & Adisa Ajamu. 1999.^{[8]The psychology of blacks: An African-centered perspective (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.}

Black psychology is nothing more or less than the uncovering, articulation, operationalization, and application of the principles of the African reality structure relative to psychological phenomena.

Kobi K. K. Kambon (also known as Joseph Baldwin), 1976.^{[9]Black psychology and black personality: Some issues for consideration. Black Books Bulletin 4(3), 6-11.}

African Psychology is the recognition and practice of a body of knowledge which is fundamentally different in origin, content, and direction than that recognized and practiced by Euro-American psychologists. The differences between African Psychology and Euro-American Psychology reflect the differences between Black people and white people or, in terms of basic culture, between Africans and Europeans.

Cedric Clark, Phillip McGee, Wade Nobles, & Luther X Weems, 1975.^{[10]Voodoo or IQ: An introduction to African psychology. Journal of Black Psychology, 1(2), 9-29.}

Aryan Kaganof: I am struggling with this. I am struck, reading through the “Ten Definitions”, that the problem with them, and indeed, the problem with the entire African Psychology, is that there is a lot of talk about African Psychology, what that might or might not be, but not a sentence about Psychology. Surely we need to define “Psychology” as a foundational first principle to understand what is going on here? If we know what Psychology is, then we can move on to what Psychology isn’t, vis-a-vis “African Psychology”. Or, to put it another way, if we know what “Psychology” presumes to do, and doesn’t do when it comes to so-called black people, or African people, or, African people in Diaspora, then we could better understand the need for “African Psychology” and also all the reasons why it is precisely so complicated to define. It feels like we have missed out Stage 1 and therefore the entire definition project is floating, it lacks what linguists call a syntactic constituent—a group of words that functions together as a complete unit.

Kopano Ratele: I want to clarify something for you about what you call Stage 1. First, though, let us not talk about so-called black people, please.

Second, it is not a mistake that you do not place an adjective before Stage 1 Psychology. It is overdetermined by the history of disciplines. Let us therefore refer to this Stage 1, because it is unencumbered with adjectives, Unadjectivised Psychology. But a more appropriate label for it is Zero-point Psychology.

Third, if you and I are always inclined to explain our own and other’s internal states and behaviour, we can reasonably assume that all humans, from the beginning of human life, well before the civilisations of Mesopotamia, China, the Aztecs, Egypt, Greece, or Mapungubwe, have always sought to explain all those matters in which psychologists are interested and specialize. I am talking of matters such as aggression, attraction, consciousness, and cognition; child and adult development, emotion, groups, memory, mind; and motivation, perception, personality, psychopathology, psychotherapy, sensation, and work. As for Zero-point Psychology as disciplined inquiry, that enterprise is said to have been born in Europe, specifically a place called Leipzig, in Germany, in 1854. That’s one story you are likely to hear. This German-born Psychology, which is studied, employed and disseminated not only in Germany and nearby countries in Europe where it was born, but all over the world, is what you call Stage 1, I suppose.

Now, how European Psychology is exported to parts of the world outside of Europe like to African, the Caribbean, Latin America, Abya Yala, is that it comes as part of a colonising mission by European powers. This is a very important element in the story you want to include when you ask a question such as the one you asked. Why, then, I would like to ask you, should Africa and African diasporic knowledges even engage with knowledge that did not engage with them, that pretended that what Germans said about human minds and emotions was all that was needed to be said, and nothing the Herero or Jews said or would say mattered? Why?

You see, I don’t think your struggle and the question you are asking are only so as to make it easier for readers of herri to understand what African Psychology is. I do not think the question to define Zero-point Psychology is only so we can make African Psychology less complicated. If you think about it, the problem is precisely why there is Psychology that pretends to be from no-place, a Psychology from nowhere. Is there really such a Psychology? Is there really a Psychology that is not embedded in how actual people live in an actual society and think about their lives in the world in which they live? I could offer a long reading list about things like white epistemologies, white ignorance, scientific racism, cultural racism, epistemological exclusion, etc, as companion reading so as to get African Psychology and to show why the struggle with what is going on here that you have is the struggle with the lie of Unadjectivised Psychology – but I won’t. I don’t want to do it because, in some way, similar to asking black people who are going about their business of healing and protecting themselves from the assaults of colonial racism and white supremacy, what you are asking is something like ‘can you say something about white people’.

The thing is, if people create entire libraries and universities and centres that house knowledge that declares that others, what you called so-called black people, are not humans so these people can’t have knowledge, these dehumanised people have several options. Among these is the option to try to prove that you, who is said to be not human, are human. That you have a civilisation. That you have knowledge.

Do you see the problem? You are not likely to ever win; at best, it will take you centuries to persuade those who have de-humanised you that you too are human. That is the implication of what you are asking when you want me to define Stage 1, and then African Psychology in relation to Zero-point Psychology. It is Zero-point Psychology, which claims to be the scientific study of human behaviour that is floating, not African Psychology. That is where your struggle stems from.

But many of us do it; we fall into the trap you have set for me here, which is to respond to the insistence to always talk with Zero-point Psychology as the main reference point. Even though we know that this apparently place-less Psychology has no real place for us, has no place for humans like us, for our cultures, some of us will die wanting to be part of Psychology that pretends to have no ties to any culture. We play the unwinnable game to do what you are asking. We want to prove we are human. We have knowledge. We have minds. Can you understand that this is humiliating?

And although it is admittedly hard to altogether turn away from the humiliating Stage 1, culture-less, Zero-point Psychology, there are other options. For instance, you can start a whole new area of epistemic work. You can call the area Moya. It will take time, and there’s the world to convince. You can return to the source to see how people in your corner of the planet used to solve things like mental pain, relationship breakdown, raising children, or death. This is what is called Indigenous Psychology. You can define yourself in whatever way you want and should not be coerced to reference whatever those who dehumanised you said.

Finally, let me state this again. What you call Stage 1, born in Europe, is Colonial Psychology because of the way it has regarded Africa and Africans. And while it was born in Europe, this Psychology now has its centre of power in the United States of America where it has flourished like nowhere else. This is why we call this Psychology, EuroAmerican Psychology, Western Psychology, or WEIRD Psychology. These are the adjectives that you forgot to add when you asked me your question. This EuroAmerican Psychology, which is the very source of foundational problems of African Psychology, the foundation of the upside-down epistemological world in which African psychologists and Psychology students exist, is what you want me to engage with?  

Aryan Kaganof: I want you to engage with the consequences of your naming of this discipline as “African Psychology”. Readers can watch you, in your discussion with Sophia Sanan about African art, talking explicitly about naming, and the importance of naming. This is what you say:

“One is we have to name things, things have to be named. That’s, that’s what what the academy does. We give them names, you define them. And so that’s the problem sometimes of, of evading a category like African, like sometimes, yes. But we have to name things. And the naming is, is, uh, is where we are. Sometimes we have to name it. (…) It must be named to be known.”

“It must be named to be known.” That’s beautiful. But why then name African Psychology precisely that? Why saddle yourself with a word describing the study of the mind that is derived from the Greek? Surely there must be an indigenous African word that would do the job as well? In fact, do the job better, since the word “Psychology” is the cause of much grief to you, so much so that you are even loath to speak about it when it comes “unadjectivised”.

You accuse me of having set a trap for you to fall in by asking my question about first principles. But you don’t see that if there is a trap it is entirely of your own making. I see your entrainment within the University system, within a discipline, as a form of capture which is analagous to Stockholm Syndrome. The naming is the key. Let’s consider briefly what Zim Ngqawana says, in his discussion with Es’kia Mphahlele about the failed re-naming of this country, about the African practice of naming a new-born child:

Culturally speaking you know the importance of the name, when a child is born. I would imagine at this re-birth that we should emphasize on the name. I mean I know in my tradition when your wife is pregnant for those nine months the husband has to be in that state of meditation so he has to come up with the right name that will resonate positively to the child when that name is resounded.

Now obviously naming a discipline is not the same thing as naming a child but surely, given the importance of the project at hand, this naming decision should have been more self-reflexive, more imbricated in an African practice that would invoke spiritual success? It is Augustine Nwoye who writes:

Another important belief in Africa, which is entrenched in the transcendental or spiritual component of the African self, is that thoughts and words have power to bring about the state that they symbolize.

I put it to you that in naming the discipline “African Psychology” you have possibly shackled yourself to a situation of perpetual compromise out of which no true healing can emerge. “African Psychology” might be another example of what Prof Lwazi Lushaba calls “cognitive domination”, or, as Lefifi Tladi puts it, “it is the wrong tool for the job, a neo-colonial solution”. This same crisis of imagination resulted in this country remaining a direction – “South Africa” – instead of being given a proper, well-considered name in 1994. Is it any wonder then that here we are, thirty years down the line with Helen Zille and John Steenhuis in government? In a country of 63 million people of whom only 4,5 milliion are so-called “whites”? It’s all in the naming.

And now that we are back at “so-called” let me explain that. I’m a poet, not an academic, so for me the word is what is important not the word count. In my world all words operate on the level of the symbolic, the mythic, as well as their more mundane, everyday functioning. I believe that every time we call somebody “black” we are reifying a particular history, a history indeed, of dehumanization. When I say so-called black or so-called white I am reminding myself and whoever is listening that these appellations are not true, are not real. They are the products of racist thinking and they are time based. No African woman called her son “black” before the arrival of the so-called “whites”. This nomenclature arises in time and it will fade in time. But it will not fade if we cling on to the actual indices of dehumanisation as if they are the means of being proud, of finding humanity.

Palesa Mokwena, in her article about Lefifi Tladi, makes the point that:

For Tladi, replacing the word Black with the word African changes the concept and vision of the Black Consciousness movement completely because what this essentially means is that the attention placed on human beings as being the centre is taken back and we are forced to acknowledge nature (African environment) as the centre because humans are nothing without nature or their environments. Tladi reminds us that consciousness is a ‘state of presence’ meaning that where you exist (Africa) should be all that matters. 

African consciousness is more profound than Black Consciousness, as blackness is a state of mind – that’s what Steve Biko said – and Africanness is the reality of the mind, body and soul.

Lefifi Tladi

Kopano Ratele: Words are magic. Absolutely. And because I know this I have been on a mission to rename the project we are prosecuting, because we are trapped by the name. However, I recognise that is a difficult mission I am I pursuing, perhaps even a trip bound to failure as the trap is even more elaborate, the domination more sinister, than simply naming. Finding a new name is a small step part of getting out of the hole.

We are trapped in a linguistic colonial matrix.

It is a matrix of unbelievable dimensions, of parallel dystopian universes. It ontological; it is cultural; it is epistemological; it is political. It is, in a mind-blowing way, also psychological. That is to say, the so-called African psychology has a psychological problem. I should say, psychologists in Africa who have achieved  success in their careers are suffused in an onto-psychological inferiority complex. That is, the psychological issue that haunts the dreams of the successful African psychologist begins with language, a tool that is key to the psyche. The problem the psychologist has is therefore different from but entwined with the ontological, but also with the cultural, and the epistemological, and the political issues she is confronted with.  

As an aside, it has been said that the issue of language, when it comes to nations, such as where a nation is linguistically dominated by another nation, or a group is linguistically dominated by another, negatively affects the economic, scientific, and technological development of the dominated nation or group. To link it back with Psychology, if you don’t have a Psychology done in your indigenous language, your scientific, technological as well as economic development will be hampered.

The trap of the colonial linguistic matrix is one that only a handful of psychologists and students of Psychology have examined. For example, the psychologist Lesiba Baloyi, writing with the philosopher Mogobe Bernard Ramose, strongly argued that Africans should avoid using English or any Western language as a starting point if they want to understand themselves and advance the African knowledge base in psychology. This applies to any other discipline, I presume. The two also argued that the adoption of indigenous language psychologies would be a necessary decolonising move to give voice to and reclaim the identities of the formerly colonised and oppressed.

Mbalenhle Gumbi undertook a study on the lack of and many challenges regarding linguistically and culturally appropriate intellectual assessment tools for indigenous language speakers, in this case a Zulu speaker. You can extend the linguistic challenges to other assessment tools, for instance those employed to assess mental health or understand personality.

Puleng Segalo and Zethu Cakata wrote about psychology and language in a paper titled ‘A psychology in our own language’. In the paper they argued for the need to use indigenous languages if we really want an African Psychology that is serious about local contexts.

In another paper, Cakata writes generally on the role of indigenous language in teaching and learning in South Africa. The problem, then, is bigger than Psychology. More specifically, with respect to African Psychology, she argues for the use of indigenous African languages for epistemic purposes, illustrating how language carries its people’s knowledges

But here is the devastating irony, a demonstration of the deep hole we are in: all these papers are in English, just as I am speaking here.

Aryan Kaganof: Is it possible that an “African Psychology”, if it is true to its own history, its own genealogy, its own psyche, might in fact be a Psychology contra “Psychology”, and that if it is successful it would overthrow “Psychology”, at the very least as far as so-called black people in and out of Africa are concerned?

Kopano Ratele: African Psychology at its best is a double agent, most definitely. It is guerrilla work. It is, if you will, an undisciplined discipline. You have it right: African Psychology is Psychology contra Psychology. And I like the vision that if African Psychology is successful it will overthrow Colonial Psychology.

Of course, some African psychologists and Psychology students would rather go along to get along. They want Psychology in Africa to be like Psychology in WEIRD societies, which means to be like Euro-American of Western Psychology. Or they do not see a problem with being EuroAmericanist, Western-centric, or WEIRD in their perspectives. Or it is just too hard to challenge Colonial Psychology so they do not even want to try.

But other psychologists and students refuse to take the upside-down world as ‘just the way things are’. They are conscious of and resist the terms of the whitestream WEIRD Psychology. They demand a new World Psychology. No, they want to bring forth a new world-centered project to answer the problems of living, as individuals and groups, in this world; problems that result in distress, mental, spiritual, and emotional pain; problems of living with one another and living with other species.

Aryan Kaganof: I suppose I want it very simple. What does “Psychology” do? What are its parameters? What is its genealogy, its etymology? How is it constructed in the world as a discipline, as a science. What is its relation to power?

Kopano Ratele: There are many questions here. I think they are all important. But I can take only a few of them as each can occupy a whole article; nay, a book.

In response to your question about what Psychology does, I’m tempted to say, Psychology psychologises the world. And I’m tempted to run ahead and also say that Psychology is one of those disciplines that find themselves to be very useful to the military industrial racist capitalist complex. As the complex grew, Psychology grew. It has been a mutually beneficial relationship. US Psychology became integral to the US military, for instance. It still is. Psychology in many parts of the world became important to managing workers as industries grew and it still expertly fills in this role in increasing productivity and making workers happy when they should be unhappy about wages and working conditions. And Psychology all over the world became very important in helping to sell what capitalism produces, developing all kinds of strategies regarding how to make people buy things that they do not need. It has become one of the most important handmaidens for consumer capitalism. For consumer capitalism to work, people must buy stuff and psychologists are experts at finding and creating ways to make people buy stuff.

All of this is true. But much of this demands that a student of Psychology should be willing to dig deep into the history of Psychology and its unquestioned assumptions. It demands that a person works to understand the epistemic project of Psychology. It requires that the would-be psychologist or student of psychology probes the unstated goals of Psychology. Unless you are content to be fooled and believe that the world is just, mainstream Psychology takes sides, just like critical forms of Psychology take sides. While there many psychologists who go to war for the objectivity of psychological research, look closely and you see that way too many studies cannot be replicated, but also that many psychologists do take sides. The differences between a mainstream psychologist and the critical psychologist is that the mainstream psychologist wants to persuade us that she doesn’t take sides, while the critical psychologist is clear that he is against colonialism, or sexism, or racism, or violence, or capitalism, or whatever he has in his sights.

I should mention that there are many who would have you believe Psychology is a science like Physics or Chemistry. It is not. Psychology is more like a heady mix of Management Studies, Anthropology, Biology, Neurology, Literature, Philosophy, Sociology with a bit of Statistics and other disciplines thrown in. What you will find in the introductory textbooks which initiate 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds (or whatever age the first-year student is) into the world of Psychology, is a definition such as this: Psychology is the study of human behaviour. But what social science does not study human behaviour? That means Psychology is closer to disciplines like Politics, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Studies, than Physics and Chemistry.  

You have asked me about the genealogy of Psychology. I have touched on this already. I mentioned that the roots of the Psychology as a science are to be found in lab in Germany in the mid-1800s. When it comes to and settles in Africa and other parts of the world outside of Europe, it does so as part of European colonialism. That’s all I will say now.

What I want to turn to is something about the little-known history and genealogy of this project we call African Psychology. That is part of the history that is still being excavated and written down. Way before the 20^th century and the beginnings of Colonial Psychology on the African continent there was, for instance, Anton Wilhelm Amo also known as Anthony William Amo, also known as Antonius Guilielmus Amo Afer. Of course, we can go even further. We can go back to the Nile Valley or Mapungubwe or other ancient civilisations on the continent we are yet to discover. We can go back to the beginnings of life in groups. To migration from Africa. To Adam and Eve. To the beginning of human language. But let us focus on a person. Amo.

Amo’s birth is dated around 1701 or 1703. A child of the Nzema. I am under correction, but Nzema are part of the Akan people. The Nzema made life lived in Axim, the Western region of present-day Ghana.

At around age 4 or 6, Amo was taken to Amsterdam by the then Westindische Compagnie, the Dutch West India Company. He may have been taken by force. What loving normal parent gives away their baby boy to travel to another country on a slaver’s trading ship? But some accounts claim a preacher working in Ghana sent him to Amsterdam. A preacher? Working in Ghana? Sent him? How about a preacher trying to turn the heathens to Christianity while supporting land theft snatched a child with whatever lies from his parents and sent him away to his lords? The young Amo is said to have been presented as a gift – yes, a little gift of a black boy – to two dukes: Augustus William and Ludwig Rudolf of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

The story gets intriguing. Amo seems to have been well-treated. That is as interesting as anything else. Why? It makes you interested to know more about the two dukes. Maybe even the preacher.

Amo went to the universities of Halle and Wittenberg. At the former, he wrote an early thesis on The Rights of Moors in Europe. What do you think of that? But it is his doctoral work that is of particular interest. That is what makes him an early student of the mind. The doctorate in philosophy was titled On the Absence of Sensation in the Human Mind and its Presence in our Organic and Living Body. It has also been translated as On the Apathy of the Human Mind or the Absence of Sense and of the Faculty of Sensing in the human Mind and the Presence of These in our Organic and Living Body. Is that not potentially the earliest ancestor of Psychology, let alone African Psychology?   

Amo would later take up a position as lecturer at the University of Halle and then subsequently at the University of Jena. African Psychology students should study Amo. They should visit Halle and Jena and Wittenberg. Here is another piece of evidence of how Europe has been fertilised by Africa. African Psychology is not simply about life in Africa. It is about Africans in the world, a complex (en)counter with and to Colonial Psychology.    

You have also asked me the question, what is the relationship of Psychology to power. I have answered the question earlier when I referred to the military industrial racist capitalist complex. But allow me to state it another way. Psychology is a friend of the powerful. And much of mainstream Psychology does not study power, certainly not power as the structuring force of societies. Even mainstream Social Psychology, being the subdiscipline that takes up the issue of power, has curious ways of thinking about power. One, even this social branch of Psychology is individualistic, and two, much of Social Psychology treats human life as if during most, if not all, moments individuals are untouched by power.

I referred to the difference between mainstream or ‘uncritical’ Psychology and critical forms of Psychology. The former is what you would find in a Psychology 101 textbook. Critical forms of Psychology, which you are unlikely to find in a Psychology 101 textbook, include such areas of work as critical social Psychology, Feminist Psychology, Critical Health Psychology, Anti-Racist Psychology, and Decolonial Psychology. Critical psychologists of various kinds are interested in power and showing what Psychology does and what it effectively hides from our purview. For instance, the anti-racist psychologist would ask, where is the race in all of this? Does the human that you study have a race or not, and do they live in a racist world or some imagined place where race does not really matter? Anti-racist Psychology is also interested in how race and racism are conceptualised, whether the focus is on systems and institutions or on interpersonal acts?

Aryan Kaganof: Does “African Psychology” begin with Fanon?

Kopano Ratele: No, absolutely not: African Psychology does not begin with Fanon. He is an important figure. I teach a whole course to 4^th year Psychology students on Fanon because he offers very good tools to makes sense of colonialism and racism, to challenge Colonial Psychology and Psychiatry, and to revolt against the assaults of Eurocentric thought. He provides us with an anti-colonial vocabulary. Perhaps he possibly would have participated in building the project that is African Psychology, but we will never know. What I know is that he is not the originator of African Psychology.

Aryan Kaganof: Why does “Psychology” not do what it is supposed to do for so-called “Black” people, or for Africans?

Kopano Ratele: This is a beautiful question. There is a short answer, and there is a book-length – rather books-length answers – which I will leave for another occasion.

Psychology does not do what it is supposed to do for black people or Africans because Psychology did not regard black people or Africans as humans. Psychology supported the domination, indeed the colonisation, of black lives. In the eyes of the Colonial Psychologists, the black was the subhuman and Psychology was the study of human behaviour. Also, Psychology did not regard the dehumanisation of black people as worth studying, and more importantly as necessary to undo.

Another way to state this is EuroAmerican Psychology was white. This is mostly still the case. Psychology was, at its origins, a European project. And then Psychology became Americanised when American Psychology rose up to dominate the discipline. As I indicated, we currently talk about WEIRD Psychology, meaning Psychology from and for Western (that is the W), Educated (E), Industrialised (I), Rich (R), and Democratic (D) societies. For western you can also use white because the Western countries are predominantly white.

Having mentioned books, let me take the opportunity to recommend 5 books by psychologists that do what Psychology does not do for Africans and black people.

1. Black Skin, White Masks by Fanon
2. Being Black In The World, by Chabani Manganyi
3. Even the Rat was White by Robert Guthrie
4. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression by Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan
5. Psychology and Apartheid edited by Lionel Nicholas and Saths Cooper

Aryan Kaganof: What then are the various kinds of “African Psychology” that have emerged in order to rectify this lack, and attempt to do what “Psychology” is failing to do?

Kopano Ratele: How do you rectify centuries of dehumanisation? That’s the question you should ask? How do you rectify over 150 years of a deliberate neglect of black and African people by White Psychology? And aren’t you, with your question, channelling what some people, even many people, tend to do about those who have been hurt and harmed by saying, asking, ‘well what have you done to rectify this lack that Psychology has failed to address?’ Aren’t you saying, in the question you are asking, ‘what are you doing to get out of this centuries-old harm, that we better hurry up and fix ourselves? It sounds like that. But I believe that you do not intend it to be interpreted in that way. I will take it as a generous invitation to say what has been done, what is emerging, and what needs to be done by many of us, students of Psychology and psychologists, that the discipline is still largely failing to do.

In this country, for example, what has happened in the last three decades is noteworthy. We have many more black psychologists. We shouldn’t scoff at that. We have many textbooks by black and progressive psychologists of all ethnicities and outlooks, people like Norman Duncan, Ronelle Carolissen, Leslie Swartz, Martin Terre Blanche, Sumaya Laher, Kevin Durrheim, Desmond Painter, Lionel Nicholas, Derek Hook, Mohamed Seedat, Augustine Nwoye, and others. We have other kinds of books, and these have been more in number, but also more generative of different ways of thinking. In this regard, I can mention books by authors such as Garth Stevens, Shose Kessi, Lou-Marie Kruger, Shahnaaz Suffla, Floretta Boonzaier, Tammy Shefer, Malose Langa, Nick Malherbe, Peace Kiguwa, Sandy Lazarus, Leswin Laubsher, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Hugo Canham, and several others.

That’s what has been happening in a South Africa. But there is work in other places, including Australia, Botswana, Ghana, the United Kingdom, the United States. Some of this work is more recent, but there is a longer history of work that challenges colonial, racist, Western and whitestream Psychology.

In short, then, several black and African psychologists and their epistemological allies, here and around the world, have been and are building, every day, every month, every week, every year, a body of work that challenges colonial, racist, Western and whitestream Psychology. They are undertaking work that repairs black and African lives, that heals the harm perpetrated by Europeans in Africa and against Africans and black people, that restores the humanity of all humans not just Africans and black people, that places black and African people at the centre of their worlds and stories rather than appendages of EuroAmerican stories and worlds. We are doing it one sentence at a time, one research finding at a time, one intervention at a time, one class at a time, one consultation at a time, one concept at a time, one theory at a time, one community at a time, one collaboration at a time.

But we are working against an agnostic, expansive and voracious WEIRD-centric, and indeed still deeply Colonial Psychology. It may be many years, but we will keep building a World Psychology that is not for WEIRD countries but for all on the planet. It may take sometime but we will have a Psychology that does not place white people at the centre of the human experience and does not take them as if they don’t have a race, but a Psychology of human experience. It may look impossible right now but we will keep working and building and crafting and excavating and cultivating until we have a Psychology from Africa, but not only for African and black humans, but for all the world.