To seek to entrench African-centred psychology is a quest to better locate Africa and Africans in knowledge. To try to locate Africans better means to situate them in less stereo-typical ways, to produce ideas that are disalienating for a meaningful life in Africa. ‘Disalienating ideas’ refers to those ideas whose underlying, if not always articulated, object is to situate Africa as a place of knowledge-making for the world and to locate Africans as theory makers, not only data creators. This object encompasses investigation of the very question of what knowledge itself is, as well as of its dissemination – the building of publics for the knowledge we create as researchers, teachers, students, professionals, policymakers, or activists. The primary question that we must deal with in African-centred knowledge is therefore always about the location of knowledge and being, as well as of power, after the facts of colonialism, slavery and apartheid.

The future of African-centred psychology does not lie in repeating the demand for it to exist alongside Euroamericancentred psychology. It lies in doing many more research studies centring Africa. Large as well as in-depth studies. Theoretical work that situates itself within cultures and institutions in Africa while generating explanations that have global meaning. It lies in unapologetically situating the fact of being in Africa in our lecture rooms, in university policies, in professional networks and associations. In understanding the self as deeply ‘affected’ by being of Africa and situated in a place in Africa. All this we have to do if we are to extricate ourselves from the enduring effects of colonial, slavocratic and apartheid systems of power, feeling, thought and being.

There are, however, three problems that confront psychologists and students in trying to see the world, their work and themselves from an African centre.

The first problem we face as psychologists or students in trying to think, teach, heal, learn, feel, or work while keeping Africa at the centre of the world is precisely how colonialism comes to reshape knowledge about what it means to be human. As part of the colonial and apartheid intellectual arsenal, psychology was weaponised, along with other sciences, towards the making of a certain understanding of Africans, who came to be thought of as black, as a different species of humans.