Confusion is never far off regarding what precisely is being referred to whenever the term ‘African psychology’ is uttered. We ought to note, therefore, at this early point that there is more than one way of defining African psychology. This is how my co-authors and I have written about the multiple meanings of the term: ‘African psychology means the same thing as, for example, psychology in, by, from, or of Africa or Africans’ (Ratele et al. 2018: 332). (I should add: psychology for Africa or Africans.) That is to say, African psychology can mean psychology in Western Sahara or South Sudan. It can mean psychology practised by Egyptians or Ethiopians. Psychology from Senegal or South Africa. Psychology of Africa, or of one or other African nation. Psychology for Africans. All of this implies that we always have to ask what preposition is being elided between ‘psychology’ and ‘Africa/n’, in order to define the kind of African psychology to which we are referring. It also means that there is always a question of why there should be a need for African psychology, when the ‘science’ of psychology is said to be universal. But, fundamentally, it is the notion of universal human science – of its truthfulness and completeness – that is at stake: a human science that bears no marks of the humans who produce it, that has been shorn of values and normativity.

It is of utmost importance to note, then, that it is not in all of African psychology that Africa and Africans are implied – only in the kind of African psychology that will be advanced here. This is African psychology sensu stricto (in the narrow sense): psychology that places Africa and Africans at its centre, while simultaneously being open and talking to a wider world.

The psychology that tacitly places Africa and Africans at its centre is, however, the ideal. That psychology emerges from under the rubble of colonial ruins, apartheid racism and post-independence despotism. The time when a psychology student at the University of Johannesburg says, ‘I am studying psychology,’ and is immediately presumed to be referring to African psychology, is in the future.