Editorial: Six theses on African Psychology for the world

Abstract

| P I N S [ P s y c h o l o g y i n S o c i e t y ] 5 4 • 2 0 1 7 Thesis 1: All of human psychology is African psychology Read from below, from the perspective of victims of slavery, colonialism and contemporary racism, histories of knowledge are reminders of subjection. Europe's triumphant march of progress expresses the destruction of indigenous know-how. European civilisation implies the dehumanisation of locals. Any history of indigenous African psychology is therefore a history of subjugated knowledge. Like all histories of victims of legislated dehumanisation, be they of the first nations, indigenous people, blacks, women and queers, such a history will always be entangled. It is outside history, against the archive, reflective of conquest. It speaks to loss, haunted by attempts at rediscovery. And so African psychology cannot but have a short, highly complicated history, even if it might have a contested, lost, unacknowledged past. Thus, all of it-the past of Africans' psychologies, the beginnings of the history of African psychology, its "fathers", and how we apprehend the meaning of African psychology-is very much wide open to contestation. Even then, colloquially speaking, where human psychology is taken as the mental make-up of a person or group, it could be said all human psychology is African psychology. Existing fossil evidence indicates that origins of modern human beings can be traced to Africa. Therefore, all human psychology is African psychology. African psychology is about all of humanity. African psychology might be psychology from Africa-but it is inevitably for the planet.