DENIS EKPO

Congratulations. I am not familiar with psychology in South Africa. But I noted these lines: ‘Psychology in South Africa is rooted in coloniality, while African spirituality is based on healing African people from colonial violence’. I wish comparing African spirituality with a psychology rooted in coloniality was that simple and advantageous to the African. As someone promoting what I call a postAfrican perspective on things African, I am persuaded that Africanity (Africanness or African spirituality) holds little or no healing values for the contemporary African. It does not heal what you call colonial violence; it merely replaces colonial violence with the more insidious violence of magic and the return to the participation mystique in the state of nature.

Colonial violence was real but was/is curable once colonisation/Apartheid ended. But the violence of a return to African spirituality/Africanness of being in the world is a major ontological force holding most of Black Africa down in anthropological stagnation and underdevelopment.

While coloniality is maligned by the Fanonians as the source of Africa’s woes, the truth is that Africanity, especially the ideologically militant return to it, is the invisible trap that holds the Afrocentrist mind captive to the structures of non- development. African spirituality is not the symbol of a healing redemption from coloniality but the self inflicted harm of a return to the pre-colonial mental and psychological patterns of cyclical nonprogress.