Euroamerican psychology (in Africa) has been influenced by colonial power in Africa. That means, unconsciously or consciously, that those psychologists in Africa who are uncritical of Euroamerican-centred ideas are passively supportive of a history of ideas infected with colonialism.

In 1949, Rene Maunier (1887–1951), a member of the French Academy of Colonial Sciences and professor at the University of Paris, who is said to have been a sociologist of North Africa, wrote this:

Who believes this? Colonisation was no mere communication. Nor was it miscommunication. Colonisation was about the conquest of land and people. It was like an infection. It was about power, sometimes exercised in cruel and dehumanising ways. It was about control of populations and the colony.

There is more. Colonisation goes beyond the control of the colonised land and the bodies of the colonised. The coloniser always aims to extract anything of value from the colony for the benefit of those who wield power in the metropole or those who live in the white areas of the colony. Colonialism always reconfigures the economy and politics of the colony. At the same time, it rearranges pre-existing social and cultural structures in the colonised territory to support its economic aims. But here is what does not always receive full treatment – except by some radical thinkers in Africa and elsewhere: colonisation sets out to restructure the very behaviour, desires, interrelations and identities of the subject group and their colonisers, and succeeds in doing so. That is to say, it reconfigures the psychology of the individuals and the groups in the colony.

Can we see colonisation as intercommunication? No. As the anti-colonial Martiniquan poet and politician Aime Cesaire (1913–2008) said in his Discourse on Colonialism, first published in French in 1955, ‘colonization = “thing-ification”’. Here, in a little more detail, is what he says to lead up to this structuring equation: