The problem of a nebulous Africa is found in all the sub-disciplines of Euroamerican psychology.

The issue of a master knowledge – and knowledge-making tools – is not confined to psychology and its specialities. A similar problem, to a greater or lesser degree, can be observed in anthropology, economics, gender studies, geography, management studies, political science and sociology. Within psychology, the hegemony of Euroamerican-centrism and its associated master's gaze, ideas and techniques of knowledge-making is more obvious in some branches of the discipline, like psychopathology, assessment and developmental psychology, than in others, like biological psychology.

But it is when we take a look at the less mainstream areas of psychology like community, critical, or cultural psychology that we are confronted with a deep irony: that even those who regard themselves as critics or on the margins of traditional psychology are capable of reproducing an imperialist and colonial architecture of knowledge in their relations with Africa. Thus, the problem of an invisible Africa and the marginality of African thought inheres in the core of the discipline of psychology – indeed, in the very foundations of the social sciences and humanities as a whole. The foundations of psychology, as a discipline rooted in Euroamerican-centred modernity, were built on its opposition to Africa as a primitive object, as lacking, as an absence.

The Nigerian literary scholar and poet Harry Garuba's perceptiveness about the development of silences in the production of disciplines, and how they come to be taken up in Africa, is instructive (Garuba 2012). His insights suggest to me why, in the light of the long process of developing and consolidating the discipline of psychology, a process that began in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to appreciate the role assigned to Africa and Africans. Recognition of the need for an African-centred emancipatory psychology thus begins with an understanding of how Africa and Africans were imagined at the founding of the social sciences and humanities, and still are in these disciplines as we have them today.