This book builds a case for thinking and doing psychology differently in and for Africa. Its strength lies in the author’s arguments on psychology as a colonial discipline and what it does as it is transported to the African continent.

— Floretta Boonzaier, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town.

Ratele is the kind of scholar whose experience means he can jettison old ways of doing things in favour of experimentation and breaking boundaries. He insists on meddling with and poking at accepted ways of knowing and doing. Innovative in both form and content, the book is an important contribution to our scholarship.

— Hugo Canham, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

 

What does the world look like from Africa? What does it mean to think, feel, express without apology for being African? How does one teach society and children to be African – with full consciousness and pride? In institutions of learning, what would a textbook on African-centred psychology look like? How do researchers and practitioners engage in African social psychology, African-centred child development, African neuropsychology, or any area of psychology that situates African realities at the centre? Questions such as these are what Kopano Ratele grapples with in this lyrical, philosophical and poetic treatise on practising African psychology in a decolonised world view. Employing a style common in philosophy but rarely used in psychology, the book offers thoughts about the ideas, contestation, urgency and desire around a psychological praxis in Africa for Africans. While setting out a framework for researching, teaching and practicing African psychology, the book in part coaxes, in part commands and in part urges students of psychology, lecturers, researchers and therapists to reconsider and reach beyond their received notions of African psychology.

Author’s note

1 (African)

2 The necessary adjective

3 Disorientation

4 Awake to Africa

5 A way of seeing

6 Off-centre

7 Words are not enough

8 Teaching Africa

9 Psychology is culture

10 Africa internationalised

11 Aiming for redundancy

12 Overlooked perspectives

13 Unselfconscious situatedness

14  Own goal

15 African scholarship

16 Education as ethical responsibility

17 Black children and white dolls

18 Search for Africa i psychology

19 Dethingifying

20 Three problems

21 Fog and friction

22 African enough?

23 Antiapthy, apathy

24 Superhuman subhuman

25 Sources of negativity

26 Not all (blacks) think alike

27 Causes of confusion

28 Estrangement

29 The centre

30 Terminology

31 Defining by negotiation

32 Self-sabotage

33 A welcoming home

34 Defining by affirmation

35 Scholarly extraverts and introverts

36 It’s Africa, except when it’s not

37 Points on a continuum

38 Invisible Africa

39 Calls to decolonise

40 We need to talk

41 A heterogenous terrain

42 It’s power, stupid

43 Living with constant resistance

44 A psychological history of struggle

45 Healing potential

46 Porous hegemony

47 An offshore model

48 Only a situated understanding will do

49 Satisfied with alienation

50 A worldwide we need

51 Diverse and dynamic orientations

52 Returning to definitions

53 A psychology from nowhere

54 A proposal

55 (African) American psychology

56 Mischievous questions

57 Solutions to alienation

58 Conscientisation

59 A new course

60 Complicity

61 The lost self

62 An unacknowledged past

63 Ina and of the world

64 Origins of (African) psychology

65 Birth of a discipline

66 Paternity claims

67 Fatal intimacy

68 Lineage and authority

69 Being African

70 Interconnectivity

71 Four axioms

72 Above all

73 The past in the present

74 Making space for all

75 Caveat

76 A variegated approach

77 The ultimate goal

78 Real constraints

79 Debates and contests

80 A contingent term

81 Polyvocality

82 Four orientations

83 Notes on Western-oriented African psychology

84 The world as it is

85 Notes on psychological African studies

86 A note on cultural African psychology

87 Traditions and modernities

88 Further notes on cultural African psychology

89 A note on critical African psychology

90 Misperceiving the object

91 Permeable boundaries

92 European archives, African exchanges

93 Continued hopes and frustrations

94 (African) developmental psychology

95 (African) community psychology

96 Awake to yourself

97 Tenets of psychology

98 Psychological freedom

99 Think Africa in the world

100 Always the future

References

Index

Kopano Ratele is a professor in the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (Unisa) and a researcher in the South African Medical Research Council’s Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit. He is a regular guest on radio and television, co-hosting a radio programme, Cape Talk Dads.

His books include Liberating Masculinities (2016), Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race (co-edited with Jeff Hearn, Tammy Shefer, and Floretta Boonzaier, 2018).

This book builds a case for thinking and doing psychology differently in and for Africa. Its strength lies in the author’s arguments on psychology as a colonial discipline and what it does as it is transported to the African continent.
— Floretta Boonzaier, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of
Cape Town

Ratele is the kind of scholar whose experience means he can jettison old ways of doing things in favour of experimentation and breaking boundaries. He insists on meddling with
and poking at accepted ways of knowing and doing. Innovative in both form and content, the
book is an important contribution to our scholarship.

— Hugo Canham, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg