My search for Africa in psychology was a search for a more welcoming home, a community for myself and later on for my students. What I found about Africa in psychology was ignorance, stereotypes, a dismissal of a whole continent of people in a sentence, or complete silence. When Africa was mentioned, it was an Africa neither I nor my students recognised. We could not relate. Partly because of this ignorance, absence, stereotyping and unrelatability, partly because it is really up to African scholars to write about the world from Africa as much as about Africa for the world, I gradually turned away from psychology towards studies on men and masculinities. From 2004 to 2007 my university formally agreed that I could divide my time between its Psychology Department and the Women's and Gender Studies Programme.

But for my own sanity I needed to draw the disparate elements of my work into a more coherent whole, with less jarring contradictions. Doing so was necessary to my health, and to the efficient use of my time and energy. I had to trace a clear connecting thread between psychology and masculinity. Searching for a home did not only mean finding a single university department or centre to contain my intellectual interests. It also meant trying to find what could be referred to as a disalienated identity, a certain way of being in (a) place where I would feel less like an interloper, less like an outsider; a way of being part of the world while being African. Specifically with respect to the question of Africa in psychology, it was a search for a way to be at home in a global psychology that is overwhelmingly dominated by US and Western European explanations, tools, concepts, therapeutic models and findings, and therefore can make someone who lives in an African country feel alienated. It is especially important to recognise that this was a search for a way of being black and yet ordinarily entitled, for want of a better concept, for I wanted the best and worst of all worlds. I like being black, but even in conditions where blackness becomes salient I am first and last always a man, not twice a man because of what men of my skin colour are enabled to see, and by no means half a man because of the history they have endured.