In nearly the same words, I have contended that seen from below, from the perspective of the subjugated, exploited, disenfranchised and excluded, read by victims of slavery, colonialism and contemporary global racism, the history of colonial and apartheid psychology, like the history of all knowledge produced by those uncritical of slavery, colonialism and racism, is another reminder of subjugation, of other forms of violence besides the epistemic kind (Ratele 2017b). The ascendancy of Euroamerican psychology, not too dissimilar to the reign of European and American ideas over Africa, always already expresses and celebrates the destruction of indigenous know-how. Western civilisation freights within it the conquest and dehumanisation of what Western discourse refers to as non-Western societies.

Any attempt to write the history of indigenous African psychology is an exercise in trying to produce a history of subjugated knowledge. Like all histories of victims of legislated dehumanisation, be they of the first people, the indigenous, blacks, women, or queers, such a history will always be entangled history: the history of the dominated is trapped, indeed eclipsed, by that of the dominators. It tries to speak of a past outside history, against the existing, readily available colonial archive – which is to say, a library, a museum, a university – reflective of conquest. It seeks to speak to loss, it is haunted by attempts at rediscovery.

Hence, I have said (Ratele 2017b), African psychology will always have a truncated, highly complex history, and 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 wide open to contestation.

Where human psychology is taken, colloquially speaking, as the mental make-up of a person or group, it could be said that all human psychology is African psychology, since the origins of modern human beings can be traced to Africa. Given this, but also because it is desirable to be free to talk to all human beings (and animals, plants, other forms of life, and the earth), we have to say that African psychology cannot be restricted to Africa. African psychology might be psychology from Africa – but it is inevitably for the planet.