Abstract
Augustine Nwoye’s African Psychology: The Emergence of a Tradition is a valuable and distinctive contribution to the ongoing project of decolonizing and reconstructing psychology in postcolonial Africa. It also has implications for the transformation of global psychological theory and practice. Prof. Nwoye, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa, draws on his extensive experience as a distinguished researcher, clinician, and educator who has lived and worked in both East and West African settings. In this wide-ranging volume, he lays out his vision for what African psychology is and could be. The book deals with many substantive themes and topics, both metatheoretical and applied, while simultaneously being in explicit or implicit dialogue with cultural, decolonial, and critical-theory approaches to psychology.
Nwoye’s approach has some affinities with the broad field of cultural psychology. That latter field has older sources in anthropology and in nonhegemonic approaches to psychology, but it became more visible and developed in the English-speaking world over the past three or four decades (Bruner, 1990; Stigler et al., 1990). The importance of reconstructing psychological science in accord with cultural psychologists’ and psychological anthropologists’ insights has gained even stronger traction during the past 20 years (Arnett, 2008; Medin et al., 2010; Rogoff, 2003). There has been more widespread acknowledgment of the fact that all psychologies (including Euro-American academic and professional ones) are, in significant ways, ethnopsychologies. There has also been greater recognition of the fact that the longstanding use of Euro-American psychological constructs, yardsticks, and practices to study and appraise persons in other cultures has been fraught with epistemological, methodological, and ethical problems.
A second theoretical lineage that is critical of psychology’s ethnocentrism has focused on the discipline’s coloniality, that is, its multifaceted collusion with (or even emergence from) oppressive knowledge/power systems. This turn towards “decoloniality” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) draws from seminal work by anti- or postcolonial writers (Fanon, 1967; Nandy, 2009) as well as from other theoretical, philosophical, and activist traditions; it has taken different forms in different parts of the world. (Some decoloniality theorists even advocate completely dismantling modernity and its forms of knowledge, although it is hard to see how this would work in practice.) A third approach pursues decolonizing ends from yet another theoretical angle. Such theorists favor critical systems of interpretation that are of European-American origin, such as neo-Marxist or psychodynamic theories, because they find them to be illuminating and potentially helpful for overcoming the persistence of colonialized subjectivity, exploitation, poverty, violence, and other postcolonial conditions (Hook, 2008; Long, 2021).
In African Psychology, Prof. Nwoye advances a psychology that resists the colonialist marginalization and distortion of African persons and cultures, and that is responsive to the lived experiences and needs of contemporary Africans. Although he thus shares many fundamental goals with the approaches noted above, his strategy is to place African and non-African psychologies in commerce with one another in some relatively novel ways.
The book is divided into four sections. The chapters in the first section, “Background and Definition: A Postcolonial Theory of African Psychology,” offer an overview of the vision that informs the rest of the book. Nwoye characterizes his postcolonial approach to psychology in Africa as “Africentric” and “Madiban.” He uses the term Africentric to refer to psychological theories and practices that “empower Africans wherever they are found to place themselves in the center of their scholarship and analysis so that their works . . . are grounded in a relevant historical and cultural context” (p. xxi). Thus, he wants to divest African psychology of the deleterious and limiting effects of the imported, dominant Eurocentric perspective. He argues that psychologies grounded in that perspective (particularly approaches that entail empiricist assumptions and methodologies) are inadequate for studying the realities of contemporary Africans’ experience, and that they still perpetuate negative and derogatory images of African persons and cultures.
Nwoye wants this emerging postcolonial psychology to encompass not only indigenous African traditions, and not only modern Africans’ lived experience, but also “aspects of Western psychology that appear relevant in enabling us to confront the challenge of our African predicament” (p. 50). In other words, he wants to include any and all theories and approaches that could be illuminating or helpful for contemporary Africans. Thus, the second principle that informs his approach is what he calls “the Madiban tradition.” He notes multiple sources and meanings of this term, but he uses it here to mean “inclusive engagement and conversation between African psychology and Western and other foreign-based psychologies (e.g., African American and Asian psychology)” (p. 14). He wants “to foster reciprocal dialogue between different psychological paradigms (African, African American, Eastern, and Western) that constitute the common heritage of psychological scholarship in contemporary Africa” (p. 17). Nwoye advocates this strategy because he believes that it is the best way to not only foreground Africentric approaches, but also facilitate non-Africans’ understanding of African psychology, thereby also promoting the decentering and transformation of Euro-American approaches.
One of Nwoye’s main motives for promoting this Africentric and Madiban orientation is his desire to advance the ongoing restructuring of psychology curricula in African universities. He envisions his book as a text that can be used for this emerging curriculum, which increasingly foregrounds the lived experience and needs of contemporary Africans, and does so using psychological concepts and perspectives from African cultural standpoints. But, as noted above, he also believes that the most fruitful path is to forge complementary, supplementary, and integrative relationships between multiple cultures’ ways of knowing and healing. Thus, in concert with his Madiban orientation, Nwoye associates his work with Globalectics (wa Thiong’o, 2014). He uses this term not only to indicate his openness to different cultural traditions and his desire to decenter from a single, unipolar, hegemonic psychology, but also to advocate a multidisciplinary approach. This is an approach that delves into all fields of knowledge concerned with the human condition. Throughout the book, Prof. Nwoye draws on his remarkable command of both African and European-American psychological, literary, and theoretical–philosophical traditions, putting them in relational dialogue with one another.
In addition to the introductory section, African Psychology contains three other sections, each of which includes multiple chapters. The section titled “Theories, Epistemologies, Methodologies” has chapters on motivation, the self, dreams, the body, research methodologies, and other topics. “African Therapeutics: Perspectives and Approaches,” contains three chapters that engage with Euro-American therapeutic approaches, such as the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of diagnosis and treatment. Noting the omissions and distortions of the BPS and other “Western” therapies, he proposes amendments and supplements that he finds better suited to the cultural demands and lived realities of contemporary Africans. In the final section, “Psychology, Culture, and Community Practice in Africa,” Nwoye points up the limitations of using Euro-American approaches to address the enduring forms of suffering, injustice, privation, (literal, structural, and symbolic) violence, and moral injury that affect many African persons both on the continent and as immigrants. He discusses specific contexts and consequences, arguing that they are often better understood and addressed with ritualized forms of healing, narrative motifs, and community-oriented practices.
Nearly every chapter in this volume, no matter what its specific topic, overflows with themes drawn from a very wide range of thinkers and theories, as well as Nwoye’s own creative and synthetic insights. His emphasis on a plurality of epistemologies and methodologies is refreshing and generous, and it makes pragmatic and strategic sense. (The only perspectives and methodologies he is less sanguine about are material–reductionist and purely quantitative ones). Useful and stimulating as they are, such breadth and expansiveness can sometimes be overwhelming for the reader. Prof. Nwoye’s ambition to harmoniously integrate so many disparate strands, or to enable complementary or supplementary relations among them, will inevitably provoke questions. Some of his chapters on specific topics do suggest possible resolutions, and I look forward to seeing more such work in the future. Some readers might also wonder about using the umbrella term, “African,” to encompass so many ethnic or cultural groups and regional histories. However, Nwoye addresses this question with some thoughtful responses.
African Psychology: The Emergence of a Tradition is an important contribution that can inform current practice and education, enhance understanding, and spur further research and theoretical development. It is the product of insightful, earnest, and reasoned reflection on the ethical, political, cultural, and societal realities and complexities of developing psychological theory and practice in African contexts. It is likely to generate discussion and debate, not only among psychologists who work, teach, and study in Africa, but also among all of us who are committed to the ongoing, multifaceted project of thinking through the decolonization and reconstruction of local and global psychologies.