What can you do with cultural African psychology? From a certain angle, values are at the heart of the science of human behaviour. Perhaps all human activity is always about values. If this is so, then value-based African psychology enables what no other kind of psychology has been able to do – that is, understanding human beings as value-driven. To study psychology from this orientation would be to study how people are driven by, make, contest and change values.

To illustrate the potential of cultural African psychology, consider most events we might read of in newspapers or witness in daily life. Whether it is in relation to the uplifting acts by Orlando Pirates soccer players Kermit Erasmus and Daine Klate in walking onto the pitch with their kids to collect their Nedbank Cup medals and trophy, or Boko Haram's abduction of more than two hundred girls in Chibok, Nigeria, or the trial of the athlete Oscar Pistorius for fatally shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, the question of how cultures are organised, what humans value, or what we believe about a range of phenomena is always in play. In the above examples, we see how footballers interact with their children (in a way that has become more widely acceptable only in recent decades, and was not commonplace in previous generations); how terrorists relate to girls and young women (abducting them and forcing them into marriage); how some men relate to their intimate partners (and the violence that attends such relationships). What connects these examples is the subject of men and masculinity, and some of the associations of masculinity with cultural beliefs and values. What research investigations from the vantage point of, and courses in, value-based African psychology might be able to offer in these instances are insights into the conditions that facilitate involved fatherhood among footballers; the prevalent kinds of relational norms and perceptions of girls and women among terrorists; and contradictions in enactments of, and discourses on, values on violence and love in intimate partnerships.

This is a well-known fact, but it might be useful to repeat it here: a culture that leaves emotional nurturance of children to women tends to be one in which men are left – leave themselves – to do the soccer playing, thinking, fighting, earning and politics.