What and for whom is a decolonising African psychology?

Abstract

Contributing to work that locates the place of psychology in countering coloniality, we explore in this article what and for whom is a decolonising African psychology. We answer these questions not with a definitive statement, but through several moves, signals, and routes. First, we conceptualise African psychology as a kind of transdisciplinary praxis that occurs within psychology as well as outside of the received bounds of the discipline. However, rooting this praxis-oriented psychology within a decolonial attitude ensures that African psychology takes emancipated visions of Africa and of the world from Africa—rather than the disciplinary dictums of psychology—as its starting point. Then, in considering for whom a decolonising African psychology is for, we insist that such a psychology, taken as transdisciplinary praxis, is ultimately for everyone in its humanistic commitment to those lives that have been partialised under coloniality. This commitment does not, however, render a decolonising African psychological praxis immune to recuperation, and measures must be taken to guard against this.

Botho/Ubuntu paradigm as cognitive justice in psychology

“…We perceive botho/ubuntu as containing a rich heritage that can provide practical applications and guiding principles. Malherbe and Ratele (2022) suggest critical, emancipatory knowledge. Critical African psychology spearheads traversing the ecologies of knowledge construction, and we propose benchmarking on the botho/ubuntu paradigm for cognitive justice in psychology.…”

“…The individual can only say: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am” (p. 141). Masolo (2010) writes about Kiswahili terms ujirani, utubora, or ujamaa, which “connote relational states that go beyond friendship or warm relations with a neighbor or kin. They describe the sociomoral states that every child is taught and that every right-thinking person is called upon to consider implementing as the objective of his or her everyday conduct” (p. 240).…”

"The world looks like this from here": Kopano Ratele's African psychology.

“…In their special issue on decolonization and psychology, Adams et al (2015) similarly present a biting critique of such universalist approaches to knowledge in psychology. Ratele’s own strand of work (Malherbe & Ratele, 2022; Ratele, Malherbe, et al, 2021) tackles head on the problem of rigid conceptualizations of culture that primarily serve to prop patriarchal and other opportunistic deployments of the concept.…”

Indigenous psychology in Africa: Centrality of culture, misunderstandings, and global positioning

“…Malherbe and Ratele (2022) point out that “decolonising African psychology should, therefore, encourage disidentification with coloniality from all people and, with respect to Africa” (p. 124) because “Decoloniality demands our material and psychic disinvestment in identifications with White, cisgendered, heteropatriarchal capitalist modernity/coloniality” (p. 124). They acknowledged that decolonising psychology in and for Africa entails a loss of power and “renders it a project that is potentially for everyone” (Malherbe & Ratele, 2022, p. 124). Even though AP should serve everyone, the attempts at decolonisation are a struggle for power between a Black elite (predominantly educated, middle-class males) and the Western elite.…”