Perhaps the most intractable issue is that of alienation. Alienation compounds the confusion surrounding African psychology.

There are several scholars who have written on the idea of alienation, such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Erich Fromm and Frantz Fanon. But let us begin with some basic definitions. A standard dictionary definition of alienation is ‘the act of estranging or state of estrangement in feeling or affection; loss of mental faculties; the act of transferring ownership of anything; diversion of something to a different purpose’ (Brown 1993: 51).

Alienation exercised Fanon a great deal. In Toward the African Revolution, he states:

Alienation distorts our vision. It infects our existence. It induces us to disapprove of ourselves, to regard our ways of living, now seen as inferior when compared to those of the oppressor, in deprecatory terms.

Someone else who had something to say about alienation was Bantu Stephen Biko. In the trial of members of the South African Students’ Congress and Black People's Convention (organisations designated illegal by the apartheid government) in May 1976, Biko, under cross-examination, made this connection between alienation and what the philosophy of Black Consciousness was meant to achieve with respect to black manhood: