Kopano Ratele

Reflecting on the problematics of psychology as a colonial, Euro-American discipline, this book builds a compelling case for thinking and doing psychology differently in and for Africa. This book sets out a situated, pluralising framework for researching, teaching and practising African psychology. 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 eminent professor of psychology 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 101 thoughts about the ideas, contestation, urgency and desire around a psychological praxis in Africa for Africans. Writing against the universal application of a Western model of psychology, which is unreflective about its locatedness even as it pushes Africa to the margins, Ratele urges readers to engage and think deeply about new ways of seeing and thinking about the self and others. He asserts that the deliberate attempt to see the world from Africa – to look at everything with the whole self from here – leads to heightened consciousness about ways of being in the world, and enhances the capacity for healing. 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.

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