Conscientisation is a fundamental concept in emancipatory African-centred interventions and self-education against Euroamerican-centred psychology. It is a concept closely associated with Freire. Conscientisation, he says, is the means via which ‘people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects’ (2005: 160). Having become critically aware of being together with others ‘in a situation’, they will begin the struggle towards humanisation (2005: 109, 119). As an educational approach, it has been absorbed into diverse registers of social activism (including political consciousness-raising). It influenced the strategies of anti-colonial and liberation movements such as the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale, the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique and the Zimbabwe African National Union; its principles and methods can be identified in the ideas of individual political leaders like Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Lopes da Costa Cabral and Oliver Reginald Tambo.

With respect to the struggles to free South Africa from white oppressive rule, conscientising the people through various media, such as radio programmes and reading materials, was one of the strategies for gaining the support of the masses that the African National Congress, the Pan African Congress of Azania and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa employed.

Conscientisation can and must be pursued in lecture rooms, in reading groups and through books, if African- centred psychology is to become an ordinary fact. Furthermore, in this age of information, and given the reach of the internet, consciousness-raising work relating to African psychology must also make use of media such as radio, newspapers, television, internet-based tools, apps and all other evolving forms of digital communication.

Conscientisation brings home to you your own alienated expertise and experiences. An awareness of your alienation – including the linguistic alienation of your expertise as well as your experiential alienation – leads to the consciousness that for those psychologists who identify with Africa, a sense of failure will probably persist until there is not only a psychology in Africa, but also a complex and meaningful Africa within the annals and halls of psychology.