Whereas Africa tends in large measure to be regarded in psychological studies as little more than an extractive data site, to begin by thinking of Africa and African as unspoken terms in African psychology is to awake to Africa – to the fact of being African, or of researching, teaching, doing psychotherapy, or studying in a place in Africa – as ontologically and epistemologically productive elements of the process of understanding, in psychological terms, the lives of individuals in the countries of Africa, from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

To be able to fully realise such a situated psychology, one that authoritatively but wordlessly situates Africa and the dynamic and complex psychological lives of Africans – the cognitive, emotional, motivational, relational, experiential, cultural and behavioural aspects of their lives – at the centre of the field of psychology, is the ultimate epistemic (regarding questions of knowledge) and ontological (concerned with questions of what it means to be human and to live with other forms of life) goal of this kind of African psychology. What is that African psychology to which we are referring, after all, if not a situated psychology?

At the same time, because African psychology demands engagement in what the black Caribbean Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon (2007: 121) calls ‘explicit adjectival techniques of appearance’, consciously centring Africa and Africans in psychology, as in all of the sciences and the arts, without uttering these terms, is something we must learn to do. To do African psychology without explicitly mentioning Africa is to clear space in the present and in history, and prevail over the erasures of Euroamerican psychology. To do psychology that assumes Africa is to claim recognition and, even more critically, to assert the fact that all of the world can be cognised from here. Because, on the whole, only a psychology that centres on a certain life lived in Western Europe and the US has so far enjoyed the power of referring to itself without the need for adjectives, and doing African psychology can mean feeling compelled to locate your work as African. The goal is to make this unnecessary, although the compulsion imposed by Euroamerican psychologists, journal editors and reviewers, and book publishers is quite real.