Under what conditions would you consider a thesis, say a master's or doctoral study, as excellent that quotes only or mainly authors from Western Europe or North America?

I read many master's and doctoral theses in my areas of interests. Some I read so as to keep abreast of what students and young researchers are doing in the field. Others because I am asked to examine them. Many of these are adequate. In fact, I could say that many of these dissertations are more than just satisfactory when compared to some of the works I have read from universities outside Africa. But because of the colonial inferiorisation of intellectual work coming from Africa, both teachers and students often fail to recognise the warped and alienating standards they have set for themselves.

The inferiorisation of much of the intellectual thought produced in Africa is internalised by blacks and whites in Africa alike. We find here, then, an instantiation of what Harry Triandis (1994) was referring to: the fact that many psychology students and psychologists in Africa have an inferiority complex vis-a-vis American and Western European psychology. Dissertations are considered good merely because they quote all the ‘right sources’, and thus are associated with some amorphous external standard set in the West.

Sometimes, however, the standard is very well defined: you have to read this researcher or that theorist, and nearly ten times out of ten it is someone coming from Europe or America – John Bowlby or Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Stanley Milgram or Melanie Klein, Abraham Maslow or Max Wertheimer; you cannot not read this theory, explanation, or model and be passed.

The crucial point is not that these theorists do not have anything worthwhile to say about conditions in Africa. It is not to argue that there is nothing to learn from explanations about psychological life developed in Europe and America. It is, rather, that the idea of the West is being elevated to the standard against which we measure the excellence of the work itself. To repeat what I said earlier: we have to overcome these pervasive and debilitating inferiority complexes.

It is on this terrain that you come upon a terrifically thought-provoking problematic. Some of the master's and doctoral work I read is really superb.