It is necessary to underline this distinction: not all African psychology is necessarily Africa-centred. This is a key idea. A difference ought to be recognised between those positions in psychology that centre Africa, that take Africa as a place from which one sees, from where the voice projects, and those that apprehend Africa as one among several sites of investigation or as a site of application. This differentiation between psychology that uses Africa as a site of data collection or application and psychology that regards Africa as a place of theory production is as vital as the idea of plurality within the body of work referred to as African psychology; it underscores the idea of African psychology as a set of orientations and not as itself a sub-discipline, or an applied branch of globalised – we will not be wrong to say world-colonising – Western-centric psychology like neuropsychology, health psychology, or human development.

It is not uncommon for African psychologists in their classes and consulting rooms to teach or work with disaffecting notions, models, approaches and texts that misrecognise a myriad of African experiences. Carrying in our brains at least two unequal and often enough antagonistic cultures, many of us offer therapy or teach in an ‘upside-down world’, the words Pal Ahluwalia used when discussing Frantz Fanon's nausea brought on by his confrontation with a white child and its mother on a street in France, which was to bring Fanon the insight that he was hated, and that the world was not what he had been made to think it was: he was not a Frenchman but a ‘body in the third person’ (Ahluwalia 2003: 344). The world of African psychologists is a world in which Africa itself is off-centre, blurry, even pathologised. To speak of an upside-down world replete with misrecognition is to attempt to bring to awareness the position from which we see the world and, of course, from which the world sees us: the terms of our meeting with other humans and animals and the natural environment, our engagement with texts, our transactions with institutions, and our negotiations with the larger world in which we exist. What troubles us, then, is a sense of dislocation, of life lived in multiple time zones, of blurred perspectives, of disrupted flows of consciousness.