African Psychology: The Emergence of a Tradition

Abstract

Journal of Psychology in Africa is co-published by NISC (Pty) Ltd and Informa UK Limited (trading as Taylor & Francis Group) African Psychology: The Emergence of a Tradition is a ground-breaking foundational text for the new field of African psychology by one of the field’s principal spokespersons . Augustine Nwoye has mapped the contours of this emerging field, assigning it a definition, and unravelling its scope and contents . In Chapter 1 of the book, Nwoye opines that the new field of African psychology in continental Africa has come into being to challenge and partner with Western psychology imported to Africa in the promotion of inclusive psychological knowledge in universities in Africa and the wider world . Therefore, Nwoye has finally written a timely and much-awaited eloquent and scholarly contribution to this emerging field of continental African psychology tailored to the interests and needs of university scholars and students in Africa and the global world . The book consists of four uneven parts, encompassing 19 chapters in all . Part I, made up of three chapters and running from page 3–90, presents the background to the entire book and foregrounds the need for the emergence of a tradition of inclusion in the study of psychology degree programs in African and global universities . Part II (encompassing pp . 91–296) consists of eight chapters and foregrounds the epistemological, methodological, and theoretical perspectives in African psychology . Explaining (in the book’s Preface), Nwoye states that “the principal goal of the Section is to illustrate some of the efforts that scholars of continental African psychology are making to unbind themselves from the restrictive ways of doing psychology as propagated in mainstream Western psychology” (p . x) . He notes that his fundamental objective in addressing the specific issues in Section 2 is to: provide a warrant and direction for considering continental African psychology as a legitimate and autonomous postcolonial field of psychology endowed with decolonized epistemologies and methodologies and its own cultural and critical orientation to psychological scholarship (p . x) . One aspect of Part III of the book, consisting of three chapters (covering pp . 297–370) and introduces the reader to the field of African therapeutics including the perspectives and approaches on which African psychological healing systems in continental Africa are grounded. The objective of Part IV, which comprises five chapters and runs from page 371–464, is to highlight the healing rituals and practices which the culture and the community in indigenous and rural Africa provide to the traumatised to enable them to transcend the challenges of their complicated everyday experience in contemporary Africa . I now give some brief and random descriptions of certain selected chapters of the book to illustrate the focus and the wide scope of this very illuminating and magisterial book . In this regard, I highlight the introductory chapter entitled “The Danger of a Single Story and the Problem of Speaking for Others” (p . 3), which provides an anchor to the entire book as it: projects the crying need for the decolonization and opening up of the study of psychology in African universities in such a way that African, Western, and other approaches to psychology would be made to coexist and enjoy enduring mutual respect, enrichment, and equitable participatory presence in psychology degree programs in continental Africa [and the world at large] (p . xi) . In Chapter 3 and in line with the postcolonial and cosmopolitan orientation of the new field of African psychology, Nwoye draws from the available evidence in the field of African archaeology (Shaw, 1978) “to challenge and dismantle obsolete racist images about Africa and its peoples propagated in colonial psychiatry” (p . xii) Highlighted by McCulloch (1995) and introduced and discussed in Chapter 5, are a number of foundational concepts and principles of human thought and experience emerging from African cultural phenomenology that form part of the knowledge base of African psychology . Chapter 8 introduces the notion that in mainstream Western psychology, people dream for themselves and are essentially self-contained in their overall mechanism of dreaming . The chapter argues that while this (Western) perspective on dreaming should not be ignored, it needs to be recognised alongside other dream perspectives . The chapter examines the concept of dreaming from an African perspective, one that goes beyond the Eurocentric paradigm and suggests that, in the Afrocentric paradigm, the individual can dream not only for himor herself but also for others . The argument developed in Chapter 11 is that the emerging field of African psychology needs an open research approach for its scholarship that is not available in mainstream Western psychology . The chapter argues that due to the complex nature of the multiple realities (natural and supernatural, visible and invisible, and the real and the miraculous) that constitute the subject matter of African psychology, the qualitative and mixed-method research methodology provides a more realistic and promising approach to the task of doing research in African psychology . Given this understanding, the chapter undertakes to clarify the epistemology, theory, and techniques of research and scholarship in African psychology . BooK REViEW