KOPANO RATELE

Euroamerican psychology (in Africa) has been influenced by colonial power in Africa. That means, unconsciously or consciously, that those psychologists in Africa who are uncritical of Euroamerican-centred ideas are passively supportive of a history of ideas infected with colonialism.

In 1949, René Maunier (1887-1951), a member of the French Academy of Colonial Sciences and professor at the University of Paris, who is said to have been a sociologist of North Africa, wrote this:

Colonisation is a contact of peoples. Apart from cases where wholly uninhabited territory has been occupied, the colonisers have come up against the earlier occupants, and have necessarily entered into relations with them: colonisation involves intercommunication.

(Maunier 1949: 5-6)

Who believes this? Colonisation was no mere communication. Nor was it miscommunication. Colonisation was about the conquest of land and people. It was like an infection. It was about power, sometimes exercised in cruel and dehumanising ways. It was about control of populations and the colony.

There is more. Colonisation goes beyond the control of the colonised land and the bodies of the colonised. The coloniser always aims to extract anything of value from the colony for the benefit of those who wield power in the metropole or those who live in the white areas of the colony. Colonialism always reconfigures the economy and politics of the colony. At the same time, it rearranges pre-existing social and cultural structures in the colonised territory to support its economic aims. But here is what does not always receive full treatment – except by some radical thinkers in Africa and elsewhere: colonisation sets out to restructure the very behaviour, desires, interrelations and identities of the subject group and their colonisers, and succeeds in doing so. That is to say, it reconfigures the psychology of the individuals and the groups in the colony.

Can we see colonisation as intercommunication? No. As the anti-colonial Martiniquan poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) said in his Discourse on Colonialism, first published in French in 1955, ‘colonization = “thingification”‘. Here, in a little more detail, is what he says to lead up to this structuring equation:

I see clearly what colonization has destroyed: the wonderful Indian civilizations – and neither Deterding [an executive of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company] nor Royal Dutch nor Standard Oil will ever console me for the Aztecs and the Incas.

I see clearly the civilizations, condemned to perish at a future date, into which it has introduced a principle of ruin: the South Sea Islands, Nigeria, Nyasaland. I see less clearly the contributions it has made.

Security? Culture? The rule of law? In the meantime, I look around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, ‘boys,’ artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business.

I spoke of contact. Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses.

No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.

My turn to state an equation: colonization = `thingification’.

(Cesaire 1972: 6)

If colonisation ‘thingifies’, an element of African-centred psychology must be to act as a dethingifying force. African-centred psychology has to be a project to decolonise the mind, affect and body, to enable Africans to be perfectly entitled to their experiences and to be in the world as it appears in their consciousness.

This article was first published as a chapter in Prof. Ratele’s book THE WORLD LOOKS LIKE THIS FROM HERE – THOUGHTS ON AFRICAN PSYCHOLOGY, Wits University Press, 2019, 978-1-77614-392-4. Re-published in herri with kind permission of the publisher, Veronica Klipp at Wits University Press.