Why should there be an African psychology if African psychology is not necessarily a psychology that studies Africans?

In simple terms, the main stimulus for an African psychology was to get out from under a Euroamerican-centred psychology dominated by the rich Western countries, which have been led since the Second World War by the US. In South Africa, the struggle was against apartheid psychology.

The ultimate goal in searching for an African psychology has been to build a relevant, appropriate, sociopolitically conscious, transformed or decolonised discipline and profession. The search for an African psychology was sometimes explicitly labelled as such, but as often was barely traceable under various discourses such as relevance, appropriateness, or transformation.

Of course, there is no one-to-one correspondence between something like a decolonised psychology and an African psychology. Some African psychological research can be colonialist, racist and sexist. What is needed is not only to centre Africa in psychology, but also to develop an African-centred psychological register that is conceivable as part of a relatively long intellectual history of de-Westernisation, to contextualise, transform, or decolonise psychology and, more generally, knowledge in former colonies and the global south.