Is African psychology about Africanising psychology? Some people believe it is. They have every right to their views. However, this is not the African psychology that the disoriented student of psychology in Africa will find meaningful for his or her life. It is not the kind of African psychology that the alienated psychotherapist, white or black, who has encountered only an impoverished lesson, if any at all, about mental life in Africa qua Africa will find readily useful to alleviate the suffering of his or her client.

On the contrary, a tremendous benefit is perceptible in the kind of psychology that does not Africanise American or European psychology but regards itself as an orientation towards the world. Regards itself as one way among several equal ways to understand the life of emotions, mind and behaviours. This African psychology does not adapt (blank) psychology to Africa, where (blank) in this case stands for whichever psychology is meant to be the legitimate version that psychologists and psychology students in Africa are supposed to Africanise, domesticate, modify, or contextualise within the conditions in their countries. This African psychology is a way of doing psychology, a way of seeing the world and Africa from Africa. It is, therefore, a centring of Africans and Africa in the nucleus of psychology. To be at the centre indicates, among several things, a striving to be (an) original, to refuse to be a copy of another, if copying suggests something inferior.

We must note that in an increasingly and more closely interconnected global economy, and with the increasing movement of people across it – without minimising the extent to which such movement is sometimes undertaken at great peril, involving confrontation with nationalistic walls and politics – there is a sense of being copies that we have to embrace. Replication is something that good psychological science strongly encourages, and so should all of psychology in Africa. We are always copying from each other, referencing one another, and not just within science. In everyday life we copy others’ views, reference their ideas, use foreign recipes, learn about other places and people. It is hard, maybe impossible, to be entirely original, without some help from others, without building on something built at an earlier point elsewhere by somebody else.