Take any branch of psychology – let's say, human development. As with all of psychology, the foundational problem in the psychology of human development is that of an absent, nebulous and dark Africa, and of strange or stereotypical Africans. The problem reaches far beyond developmental psychology, beyond psychology actually.

Given the realisation that the problem of so-called dark Africa or a nebulous Africa in psychology extends beyond the branch of psychology of human development, let us nevertheless ask a few questions of developmental psychology. These secondary questions are not intended to point an accusatory finger at those psychologists who identify as developmental psychologists. If there is any accusation whatsoever, it is directed to ourselves, and concerns what we have ignored or accepted to make ourselves comfortable within the university and professional establishment, content to reproduce the master's grand psychological narrative.

Here, then, are two paradigmatic questions that we have to keep in mind when educating ourselves, or others, into an African-centred orientation. The first question, directed at the most general level of our alienation, is why we stick with developmental psychology, despite its birth in or domination by US and Western European psychology, but more importantly why we continue to use its models, when we can see that the socioeconomic conditions under which children develop in many cultures in Africa make many of the models of child development in Euroamerican developmental psychology suspect, sometimes injurious. Do we really believe that the responses of an American white middle-class male undergraduate (a favourite subject in psychology research in the US) to questions about human development are transferable to males (and females) in places in Africa, that they are adequate for an understanding of psychological development in Africa? If there is a suspicion that there are gaps in our knowledge, or that there is a mismatch between the Euroamerican developmental psychology taught in university departments in Africa and people's actual development, why have we not been conscientised into or energetic in creating a developmental psychology with Africa at the centre?

Just in case there is any confusion about my question, let me say clearly that Euroamerican developmental psychology is exactly that: it centres European and US realities.