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10
Contents
editorial
NYOKABI KARIŨKI
On Learning that one of the first Electronic Works was by an African, Halim El-Dabh
MARIMBA ANI
An Aesthetic of Control
JANNIKE BERGH in conversation with HAIDAR EID
Even Ghosts Weep in Gaza
WANELISA XABA
White psychology, Black indecipherability and iThongo
Theme African Psychology
DYLAN VALLEY & BISO MATHA RIALGO
An Epidemic of Loneliness - introduction to the African Psychology theme section of herri #10
KOPANO RATELE in dialogue with ARYAN KAGANOF
Psychology Contra Psychology: In Search of the Most Appropriate Definition of African Psychology
N CHABANI MANGANYI
On Becoming a Psychologist in Apartheid South Africa
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN
African Psychology: serving as a reminder of human universals which have been lost or forgotten in mainstream Western psychology.
AUGUSTINE NWOYE
From Psychological Humanities to African Psychology: A Review of Sources and Traditions
SAM MATHE
Naming
ZETHU CAKATA
Ubugqirha: healing beyond the Western gaze
KOPANO RATELE
Dethingifying
PUMEZA MATSHIKIZA
A Psychological Explanation of Myself
SYLVIA VOLLENHOVEN
The Elephants in the Room
GWEN ANSELL
A New African String Theory: The Art of Being Yourself and Being with Others
ISMAHAN SOUKEYNA DIOP
Exploring Afro-centric approaches to mental healthcare
KOPANO RATELE
Four (African) Psychologies
LOU-MARIE KRUGER
Hunger
FIKILE-NTSIKELELO MOYA
"We are a wounded people."
CHARLA SMITH
Die “kywies” by die deur
KOPANO RATELE
Estrangement
MWELELA CELE
Sisi Khosi Xaba and the translation of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth into isiZulu
HUGO KA CANHAM
Leaving psychology to look for shades and complexity in despair
MALAIKA MAHLATSI
When Black academics leave historically White institutions
PAUL KHAHLISO
AGAINST COLONIAL PSYCHOLOGY
KOPANO RATELE
The interior life of Mtutu: Psychological fact or fiction?
MTUTUZELI MATSHOBA
Call Me Not a Man
WILFRED BARETT DAMON
James Joyce En Ek
ASHRAF KAGEE
Three friends in Gaza: We grieve, we mourn, we condemn, we deplore, we march, we demonstrate, we attend seminars and webinars, we wave flags, we wear keffiyas, we show off our t-shirts, but still the killing continues.
KOPANO RATELE AND SOPHIA SANAN
African Art, Black Subjectivity, and African Psychology: Refusing Racialised Structures of Aesthetic or Identity Theories
galleri
DATHINI MZAYIYA
Musidrawology as Methodology
STEVEN J. FOWLER
Dathini Mzayiya – the sound of the mark as it comes into being.
NONCEDO GXEKWA
Musidrawology as Portraits of the Artist Dathini Mzayiya & his Art
NONCEDO GXEKWA & NADINE CLOETE
Musidrawology as Methodology: a work of art by Dathini Mzayiya
NJABULO PHUNGULA
Like Knotted Strings
SPACE AFRIKA
oh baby
STRAND COMMUNITY ART PROJECT
Hands of the Future
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
The Blue Notes: Searching for Form and Freedom
DESMOND PAINTER
'with all the ambivalence of a car in the city...'
KOPANO RATELE
Ngoana Salemone/Mother
SOPHIA OLIVIA SANAN
Art as commodity, art as philosophy, art as world-making: notes from a conversation with Kopano Ratele on African Art, Black Subjectivity and African Psychology
ROBIN TOMENS
"Why don't you do something right and make a mistake?"
SIMON TAYLOR
On The Ontological Status of the Image
borborygmus
NAPO MASHEANE
Manifesto ea mokha oa makomonisi
MAKHOSAZANA XABA
Curious and Willing: Ngazibuza Ngaziphendula, Ngahumusha Kwahumusheka
RICHARD PITHOUSE
The Wretched of the Earth becomes Izimpabanga Zomhlaba
FRANTZ FANON/ MAKHOSAZANA XABA
The Wretched of the Earth - Conclusion
EUGENE SKEEF
Yighube!
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Amahubo
MBE MBHELE
Who cares about Mandisi Dyantyis Anyway?
KARABO KGOLENG
Women and Water
BONGANI TAU
Notes on Spirit Capital
ADDAMMS MUTUTA
Conflict Cultures and the New South Africa
ADAM KEITH
A Conversation with Debby Friday
DICK EL DEMASIADO
Some Notes on Cumbia and Dub
MULTIPLE AUTHORS
Thinking decolonially towards music’s institution: A post-conference reflection
frictions
AAKRITI KUNTAL
Still
FORTUNATE JWARA
In between wor(l)ds
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
A Love Letter
SHAFINAAZ HASSIM
Take your freedom and run
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
10 New Poems
KHULILE NXUMALO
Two Poems For
HENNING PIETERSE
Translating Van den vos Reynaerde (Of Reynaert the Fox) into Afrikaans
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Words to Treasure
MTUTUZELI MATSHOBA
To kill a man's pride
KELWYN SOLE
Political Fiction, Representation and the Canon: The Case of Mtutuzeli Matshoba
SABATA-MPHO MOKAE
Maboko a ga Alexander Pushkin 1799 - 1837
NAÒMI MORGAN
Why translate Godot into Afrikaans?
TENZIN TSUNDUE
Three Poems
claque
DILIP M. MENON
Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes
BARBARA ROUSSEAUX
Undoing Fascism: Notes on Milisuthando
WAMUWI MBAO
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Reclaiming the Territory of the Mind
SISCA JULIUS
Ausi Told Me: My Cape Herstoriography
SERGIO HENRY BEN
Read. Write. Relevance. A review of Herman Lategan's Hoerkind.
MARIO PISSARRA
the Imagined New is a Work in Progress
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The city is mine by Niq Mhlongo: A review
KARABO KGOLENG
The Comrade’s Wife by Barbara Boswell
DOMINIC DAULA
Pain, Loss, and Reconciliation in Music and Society
KNEO MOKGOPA
Normal Bandits: Mix Tape Memories by Anders Høg Hansen
ADDAMMS MUTUTA
‘Southern Cinema Aesthetics’: broadly imagined in multiple frames
RUTH MARGALIT
Writing the Nakba in Hebrew
LESEGO RAMPOLOKENG
Coming to Johnson
ekaya
KOPANO RATELE
From "Wilcocks" to "Krotoa": The Name Changing Ceremony
ARYAN KAGANOF
The herriverse: Introducing a new kind of Research Method, one that is Structural or even Meta- insofar as it exists in the Reader’s Navigation of the Curated Space and the Possible Contingent Connections as much as in the Objects being Curated; an Epistemic Construction therefore, that is obliquely but absolutely determined by Ontologically Unpredictable Exchanges.
MARTIJN PANTLIN
Introducing herri Search
off the record
UHURU PHALAFALA
Keorapetse Kgositsile & The Black Arts Movement Book Launch, Book Lounge, Cape Town Wednesday 24 April 2024.
PALESA MOKWENA
Lefifi Tladi - "invisible caring" or, seeing and being seen through a spiritual lens
CHRISTOPHER BALLANTINE
Edmund "Ntemi” Piliso Jazzing Through Defeat And Triumph: An Interview
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
CHRIS McGREGOR (1936-1990): Searching for Form and Freedom
SHAUN JOHANNES
In Memoriam Clement Benny
VEIT ERLMANN
"Singing Brings Joy To The Distressed" The Social History Of Zulu Migrant Workers' Choral Competitions
SAM MATHE
Stimela Sase Zola
MARKO PHIRI
Majaivana's Odyssey
EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE
The Non-European Character in South African English Fiction
BASIAMI “CYNTHIA” WAGAFA
Hyper-Literary Fiction: The (meta)Poetics Of Digital Fragmentation – an interview with August Highland
feedback
DIANA FERRUS
Thursday 20 February, 2020
LWAZI LUSHABA
Saturday 4 April 2020
NJABULO NDEBELE
Sunday 5 December 2021
BEN WATSON
6 June 2023 20:50
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
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the selektah
LERATO “Lavas” MLAMBO
Real human person – a mix by Lavas
SIEMON ALLEN & CHRIS ALBERTYN
Celebrating the genius of Ntemi Edmund Piliso: A mix-tape of twenty five tunes recorded on 78rpm shellac in 25 years – 1953 to 1968
ALEKSANDAR JEVTIĆ
Stone Unturned 18: The Static Cargo of Stars
PhD
WARRICK SWINNEY
Stick Fighting against extinction: end beginnings and other dada nihilismus polemics
hotlynx
HOTLYNX
hotlynx
shopping
SHOPPING
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contributors
the back page
ELMI MULLER
Fugitive reflections on pain, death, and surgery
DICK TUINDER
Rob Schröder (13 November 1950 - 6 July 2024)
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    #10
  • Theme African Psychology

KOPANO RATELE

Estrangement

Perhaps the most intractable issue is that of alienation. Alienation compounds the confusion surrounding African psychology.

There are several scholars who have written on the idea of alienation, such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Erich Fromm and Frantz Fanon. But let us begin with some basic definitions. A standard dictionary definition of alienation is ‘the act of estranging or state of estrangement in feeling or affection; loss of mental faculties; the act of transferring ownership of anything; diversion of something to a different purpose’ (Brown 1993: 51).

Alienation exercised Fanon a great deal. In Toward the African Revolution, he states:

Having witnessed the liquidation of its systems of reference, the collapse of its cultural pattems, the native can only recognize with the occupant that ‘God is not on his side’. The oppressor, through the inclusive and frightening character of his authority, manages to impose on the native new ways of seeing, and in particular a pejorative judgment with respect to his original forms of existing. This event, which is commonly designated as alienation, is naturally very important. It is found in the official texts under the name of assimilation.

(Fanon 1967: 38; emphasis mine)

Alienation distorts our vision. It infects our existence. It induces us to disapprove of ourselves, to regard our ways of living, now seen as inferior when compared to those of the oppressor, in deprecatory terms.

Someone else who had something to say about alienation was Bantu Stephen Biko. In the trial of members of the South African Students’ Congress and Black People’s Convention (organisations designated illegal by the apartheid government) in May 1976, Biko, under cross-examination, made this connection between alienation and what the philosophy of Black Consciousness was meant to achieve with respect to black manhood:

I think basically Black Consciousness refers itself to the black man and to his situation, and I think the black man is subjected to two forces in this country. He is first of all oppressed by an external world through institutionalised machinery, through laws that restrict him from doing certain things, through heavy work conditions, through poor pay, through very difficult living conditions, through poor education, these are all external to him, and secondly, and this we regard as the most important, the black man in himself has developed a certain state of alienation, he rejects himself, precisely because he attaches the meaning white to all that is good, in other words he associates good and he equates good with white. This arises out of his living and it arises out of his development from childhood.

(Biko 1987: 100; emphasis mine)

I am also in agreement with what the British critical psychologist Ian Parker (2007: 5) has written about alienation:

Alienation is not merely the separation of ourselves from others but a kind of separation from ourselves in which we experience ourselves as inhabited and driven by forces that are mysterious to us. These mysterious forces include economic forces that structure our lives as beings who must sell our labour to others.

African psychology as a whole is in the upside-down state it is because the bulk of psychology in Africa is alienating; it does not address the experiential life of those who may be most in need of what psychology could offer them, but does not.

Not only many students but teachers and therapists as well are estranged from their true concerns by Euroamerican psychology. There are very few who speak in their original voice. Especially when they arrive at university, psychology students are taught to rely excessively on authorities who are usually somewhere in the US and Europe. They are induced to forget their own inborn voice and creativity, and why they wanted to do psychology in the first place. This happens because many of their teachers, too, have transferred ownership of how to understand the mental and emotional lives of people around them to these authorities. The teachers were never taught to teach African psychology. Many teachers, and also therapists, are therefore not authors of their own explanations. They mimic how the Euroamerican authorities explain the contents of the mind and emotions and relationships. They teach the same ability for mimicry to their students, rather than coming up with contextually sound therapeutic explanations. It is sad. But that is precisely what coloniality has managed to achieve.

You can see why the challenge facing us is nothing less than to regain our mental faculties so as to be able to account for the psyche – certainly our own psyche – from an African-centred psychological perspective. To make sense of an issue – for instance, a personality-related problem, or a problem of communication, depression, attachment, shame, lack of trust, or learning – from an African-centred psychological perspective means making sense of it from the perspective of the daily life we live with others. Consider these questions as examples of the lives I may be talking about, and guess if these are common questions in psychology textbooks produced in Western Europe and the US:

(a) How might we understand how a child becomes the top student in the country, having grown up in a one-roomed shack with her mother, grandmother, siblings, nephews and cousins?
(b) If someone is raped, but lives quite it distance from it health facility, his family lives in it neighbourhood rife with violence where many rapes have occurred, and the family is dependent on a social grant, what is the role of the therapist in this situation, and how is the young man to be helped?

This page 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.

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