I started teaching at a university in late 1996. After years of frustration whose source was sometimes plain but at other times obscured, but a not altogether unhappy decade or so of teaching psychology, I turned away from the discipline. It would be close to a decade later that I finally came to realise fully what has been the real and constant source of frustration – not just my own frustration with the discipline and how it is organised and taught, but the frustration of many students who sit in psychology classes in African universities.

To paraphrase the famous line which is often erroneously attributed to Bill Clinton, the former president of the US: it's power, stupid.

As in any other profession, to be licensed or otherwise recognised as a psychologist is to be legitimated as knowledgeable. Knowledge, in this case, is very clearly the power to define oneself and the world. This is not an original insight.

Psychology is obviously about power – the power to speak as an expert about people's experience and behaviour. This may seem like an original thought, but I have more than a hunch that quite a few anti-establishment, radical and critically minded psychologists have said it already.

Even though it purports to deal with individual behaviour, psychology as it is practised is usually in agreement with the existing structures of power. It counsels people to adapt to their conditions. It teaches students to want to achieve upward mobility within the existing capitalist society.

African-centred psychology is therefore a position taken against the oppressive power of Euroamerican psychology. It is a call to situate Africa at the centre, and not, as is the case now, on the periphery of global psychology. It is an attitude that impels you to place yourself and your world as an African at the centre, to judge the fitness of any theory, approach, or model, every source, technique, or finding, from the perspective of life and time – in a context of severely disrupted histories and multiple temporalities – in Africa. Recognition of yourself as an African-centred psychologist is the beginning of the process of disalienation.