The need for African-centred psychology arises from, among other things, this fact: decades after the advent of freedom from colonial and apartheid rule, many aspects of the livelihoods, existence and knowledges of the former colonised in African countries continue to be dislocated by the economic, political, social and cultural interests of the US and wealthy Western European nations, specifically the interests of the global capitalist market and the local ruling classes and complicit groups. European and US interests in Africa have a long, devious and rapacious history. Some of these powers are not that hard to identify, but others remain concealed. All of them can be dated to the beginnings of the imperialist and colonial campaigns in Africa in the fifteenth century. The common driving force among all these interests, throughout history, has been the desire to control Africa economically and politically. Everything else follows from and supports this fact.

It is true that even under colonial and apartheid rule there is counter-hegemony. Resistance. Subterfuge. Some of the members of the groups subjected to these powerfully dislocating influences served the interests of their lords. They were, as Freire (2005: 45) put it, ‘sub-oppressors’ – the local bosses who may be even more exploitative than the original masters were. Freedom among some group members did not mean the creation of a new woman and new man but ascension to the level of new dominator.

It is also true that the dislocation could never be perfect. The hegemony of the dominant interest is never totalising. Among conquered women and men we always see spaces of and struggles for psychological, if not political, freedom.

Of particular concern for a psychology that is seized with the question of the dislocation of Africans is the need to be aware that the interests of the profiteering global and local capitalists, not too dissimilar from exploitative colonial and apartheid interests, want to control how the subjugated people think, what they desire, what they know, and what meanings they give to their experiences. Here too, however, the control is not absolute. There are spaces for resistance.