From a certain perspective, in the world in which I travel, through the multiple conversations I have with students, friends, colleagues and university administrators, and having taught and learned from many students, this is what I have come to realise: that talking with others about the benefits of putting Africa at the centre is of the utmost necessity, but to come to consciousness takes taxing self-work, too.

There is no denying it: the debates around African psychology can be a muddle. But more crucially, there has always been resistance to African psychology. And perhaps this will always be the case. There will be institutions that will resist a psychology that puts Africa and Africans at the centre. There will be people who will put up resistance – because of issues of personal power, miseducation, alienation, or for other reasons – even if putting Africa and Africans at the centre of psychology might benefit them or their children.

The simple reason for this resistance could be that a psychology that centres whiteness, Europe, or America is buried deeply in our social institutions. We do not just learn and transmit Euroamerican psychology. Western European and American psychology are in the psyche of African psychologists. And we inject them into our psychology students and patients in turn. If resistance to African psychology is a fact of this knowledge– power complex, we have to find ways to live with it, not necessarily on friendly terms, but with the recognition of its constant presence. We have to acknowledge that even people who are disoriented by Euroamerican psychology, and would benefit from understanding and grounding themselves within a better-situated psychology, can be resistant, because of the inferiority complex generated in them by the hegemonic form of psychology.