The need to understand the existential significance of having Africa at the centre applies to cognitive psychology, to psychopathology, to social psychology, to neuropsychology; it applies to health psychology, political psychology, feminist psychology, positive psychology, psychology of men, work and organisational psychology; it applies to all of psychology.

It has never been clearer why we need to understand the importance of African-centredness, but also how immense the task is of weaning ourselves from Euroamerican-centrism.

To disalienate ourselves we have to come up with not just ideas, but methods, models, behavioural tests, therapies, explanations and technologies in African-centred psychology. We have to find and create ways of conducting work and teaching informed by such a psychology in the African communities or groups of interest to us. We have to contribute towards a framework for being in, engaging with, understanding and writing Africa as the default in psychology teaching, research and theory-making. We have to conscientise ourselves towards being disenchanted with any kind of psychological knowledge and practice that does not centre Africa.

African-centredness in psychology begins and ends with a number of tenets.

It is focused on social relationships – of Africa and Africans to psychology. It is inspired by the interactions and identities it is motivated to study, and by the desire to make these understood by the interactants (persons interacting) and identities in question.

Within the university it aims to raise the social consciousness of students and it is open to learning from students.

In the field of research, an African-centred psychological investigator, beginning with the questions she poses, and having made and explained her findings, would want to empower those who had participated in her studies and would become further educated by the knowledge of the participants.

African-centred psychology would liberate us, the psychologists, from the European and US ‘authorities’ in the discipline and our lives.

Above everything else, African-centred psychology would fully embed itself in the realities of Africa, its histories and traditions, economies and cultures, politics, religions, multiple temporalities and modernities, even though it must always be looking at and responding to the world at large.