What is the problem to which such a situated psychology responds? Let us call it the problem of disorientation. Or of inferiority complex. Of an upside-down world, to borrow Pal Ahluwalia's (2003: 343–345) words. Confusion. Alienation. A sense that life is always happening elsewhere.

This is the problem of the domination of a psychology made in America or Western Europe over Africa and Africans – let us simply call this psychology, whenever we can, Euroamerican or Western psychology. It is the problem of a psychology practised in Africa that has very little to say about the causes of mental illness, social pathologies, violence in its bodily, institutional, cultural, governmental, economic and political forms. It is that curious feeling you have, as an African, that the psychological explanations for what is happening to you are to be found elsewhere, not around you or in yourself. In fact, that the questions with which psychologists and psychology students ought to occupy themselves are not to be found in themselves, their families, their schools, in the relationships they have or do not have, in their neighbourhoods and workplaces, in the economies of their countries or their politics. The feeling that the questions themselves, and not only the answers, lie somewhere across the seas. And that the theories and models presented in books and journal articles published in the US and Western Europe have the solutions to that disorientation, inferiority complex, sense of living in an upside-down world, confusion, alienation – rather than being their causes.

The problem to which such a situated psychology responds, then, is the problem of living well psychologically, culturally, and not just physically, but also of dying well (in contrast to dying from preventable causes like hunger, HIV/Aids, interpersonal violence, suicide, or transport-related accidents which kill so many people in African countries).