A question I am sometimes asked is: if we are in Africa, why do we need to build an African psychology (meaning an African-centred psychology)?

It is true that, since colonisation, Africa has become a contradiction. Africa's future – and past – have become entangled with Europe's interests, regardless of whether or not Africans wanted this inconvenient marriage. One example: most African economies trade more with Europe (and then, from a certain moment in history, with the US, and now increasingly with China) than with each other. Another example: most African countries do not have an indigenous language as their only official language.

I have given an answer to this question of why there is a need to build an African psychology. It bears repeating, and if nothing else, this is what is at stake: only a situated understanding can offer an answer to the problems of life as it is actually lived. African psychology is situated psychology. African in African psychology ought to be unspoken, but, because of the hegemony of Euroamerican psychology (even) in Africa, we are forced to say, this is an African-centred perspective on the psychology of (say) leadership, of learning, of children, of cognition, when what we mean is that this is leadership from the perspective of psychology in this situation.

In other words, African psychology is psychology