With the current discourse on "decolonization," it is likely that universities around South Africa will intensify their efforts-if not their rhetoric-to "Africanize" their respective curricula. For one discipline in particular, however, such efforts have been foundering for more than 30 years. This brief essay reflects on the hitherto failed attempt to "Africanize" psychology and suggests a possible route out of the current malaise.While attempts to "Africanize" psychology in South Africa have failed for many reasons, present circumstances have endowed two of these reasons with special significance. The first pertains to White psychologists who recoil at the proposition that Black people are unique psychological subjects in need of a special-that is, "African"-psychology. They tend to steer clear of what, for them, signifies ideological terrain that is an awkward reminder of apartheid era discourses of difference. Indeed, on attending any African psychology symposium at the annual congress of the Psychological Society of South Africa, one usually notices two things: first, that such symposia are standing room-only events, and second, that the number of White psychologists in the venue can be counted on one hand. In view of the fact that three-quarters of the psychologists in the country are White, significant institutional and intellectual resources that could have contributed to the invigoration of the African psychology project are lost.The second reason that the Africanization of psychology in our country has failed revolves around the unhelpful obsession with what it means to be "African." More often than not, definitions of "the African" are framed in racially and culturally exclusive ways that make it difficult for non-blacks to imagine a place for themselves in the field. Of course, one would expect nothing less with the field being dominated by Black psychologists. Perhaps the larger point is that academic psychologists engage frequently in the kinds of research that speak to them on a personal level while desisting from research that does not. That is precisely what Henri Ellenberger (1970) observed in his classic, The Discovery of the Unconscious, in which he presented a convincing argument regarding the autobiographical quality of much psychological research.What is also being suggested, however, is that there is an essentializing bent at the heart of many writings on African psychology. Moreover, because of the pervasive sentiment that the so-called "African worldview" is the sine qua non of African psychology, African philosophy has come to assume pre-eminent status in the field. Nowadays, it is neither unusual nor distasteful for an African
This article examines the attempts of psychologists in South Africa to “Africanize” the discipline. Beginning with a brief history of psychology on the continent, it contextualizes the call for an African psychology by outlining the state of the broader discipline in post-apartheid South Africa as well as the emergence of Afrocentric psychology in the United States. The article interrogates further the notion of an “African worldview” and suggests that Afrocentric psychologists remain beholden to Eurocentric audiences—the result of their continued marginalization by a Eurocentric discipline. Drawing on Fanon’s image of a Manichean psychology, the paper argues that African psychology—instead of organizing itself around cultural questions—must commit itself to a psychological analysis of the violence that exemplifies life in South Africa.
This article examines the phenomenon known as the "relevance debate" in South African psychology. It begins with a historical overview of the contours of the discipline in that country before describing the controversy's international dimensions, namely, the revolutionary politics of 1960s higher education and the subsequent emergence of cognate versions of the debate in American, European, and "Third World" psychology. The article then details how South Africa's "relevance" project enjoyed a special affinity with an assortment of ethnic-cultural, national, and continental myths and metaphors, all of which served the interests of the political formations of the day. It discusses how, in present-day South Africa, the intelligentsia has become an important catalyst for the so-called African Renaissance, which seeks to provide "relevant" solutions for the regeneration of African society. However, the global hegemony of what began in the 1970s as a "second academic revolution," aided by the lifting of the academic boycott of South Africa, has blunted the once critical edge of "relevance" discourse. A new mode of knowledge production now holds sway, the outcome of a dramatic reformulation of the capitalist manifesto in which the values of the "May 68" generation have been hijacked by a managerialist rationality. In light of the capitalization of the knowledge-production enterprise, it is concluded that the idiom of "relevance" has outlived its usefulness.
The relevance debate in psychology can be described as discourse which calls for the discipline to become more socially valuable and accessible to those who purportedly need it. Literature suggests that there is a socio-historical dimension to relevance discourse that is frequently overlooked by those engaging in the debate, resulting in a typically ahistorical and axiomatic presentation. It is therefore argued that an historical perspective on the relevance debate is necessary for an informed consideration of its attending issues. This paper compares relevance discourse from South Africa (1974–1994) and the United States of America (1960–1980) by means of a thematic analysis of journal articles published during these periods in the South African Journal of Psychology and American Psychologist, respectively. The analysis yielded six key analytic themes: Social upheaval; the pure-applied dichotomy in psychology; the role of psychology in socio-political matters; the place of human values in science; equity in psychology; and indigenising psychology. The first five themes are common to both the American and South African debates. Consequently, it is argued that the two debates arose in similar social contexts and that, in particular, the relevance debate is associated with conditions of social upheaval. This historicisation of relevance discourse permits a more critical and accurate understanding of the relationship between the debate and contemporary society.
In this article, I examine the three guiding principles of the indigenous psychology movement: ontological relativism, epistemological relativism, and the insider perspective. Using African psychology and Islamic psychology as case examples, I contend that these principles-along with the continued neglect of the question of disciplinarity-prevent the establishment of indigenous psychology as a coherent field of inquiry. I submit further that the local-global polarity is a nonissue and that a focus on materiality rather than culture can form the basis for a more viable indigenous psychology.
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