KOPANO RATELE

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.