I have not always been fully conscientised to my complicity in perpetuating colonial and apartheid-informed models of knowledge, being in the world, and sociopolitical relations.

It is easier to explain why psychologists who are descended from the side of the colonial and apartheid oppressors may not be conscientised that the lesson they learned at home about what it means to be a white human can be oppressive of black humans. It is not hard to find reasons why psychologists who racially identify as white would be unaware of why apartheid models of knowledge are objectionable. But it is difficult to explain why psychologists descended from the side of the oppressed would not readily grasp that Euroamerican psychology was primarily intended to support the exploitation and control of African countries by the West and its middlemen. Like many psychologists from the ranks of the historically colonised, as a teacher and researcher I have not always admitted that standing in front of a class of students and teaching from a textbook that treats Africa as if it were a footnote always made me complicit in reproducing the dominance of Euroamerican psychology.

You do not have to be an outright collaborator with the enemy to be complicit in the oppression of your self-defined ‘own people’. You do not have to be a Lucas Mangope to sell out your people. (Mangope was one of the so-called black leaders of the fake black homeland of Bophuthatswana under the apartheid Bantustan system. The white apartheid government designated Bophuthatswana a republic for the Tswana-language speakers of South Africa. Any Tswana speaker was liable to be forcibly removed from white South Africa after Bophuthatswana had been given ‘independence’. Like other fake black homeland leaders, Mangope was more than happy with this fake independence as it made him the president of the fake republic.) You do not have to be an askari – the term given to the black turncoats who joined the security apparatus of the apartheid government. A teacher of psychology does not have to actively want to sell oppressive knowledge to black students. And of course there is a difference between those who actively supported the apartheid government as askaris and those who were passively complicit with apartheid policy.