Although this is neither always nor fully appreciated, African in African psychology is best when unexpressed. At its strongest point, like a deeply held belief, African in African psychology is the presumed. A way of seeing. A way grounded in, for instance, the sense of hearing, thus listening and speaking and ultimately language – a key subject in cultural debates on the effects of colonialism on African intellectual thought, but also in African psychology when it comes to the question of whether we can fully understand and heal people's emotional and mental pain if we do not understand the language in which they are most at home. A way grounded in the sense of touch and its situated meanings; taste and its literal and figurative denotations and connotations; and smell and its associations, including the smells of food, in the air, about places, of bodies, smells that attract or repel us just outside of our conscious awareness.

This claim is founded on the understanding that there are no value-neutral ways of seeing, feeling or thinking. None is unaffected by power. Certainly, there are no value-barren modes of being, no forms of existence outside the reach of what is desirable, good, right, worthy or valued – and of their opposites. African in African psychology is, therefore, an enunciation. A situated practice. A wordless act involving the whole of your being. It articulates and enacts your position in the world. It is an act that reads, the world looks like this from here.

Here, to be clear, is not just a place. Here is more than simply the place where the body stands looking, the eyes in the head that look out. The self itself is here. Here refers to the self that is inside, and extends (from) the body. You say, telling the other over the phone, I am here. What do you mean? Are you only saying that your body is sitting in a chair in a coffee shop, in a town, in a certain country, in the world? Ultimately you want it to be understood that you, all of your self, is here. Here, then, is the self that looks. We look with the whole of our selves.