African psychology: from acquiescence to dissent

Abstract

Over the past 5 or 6 years, it has consistently been argued that African psychology should be recognised as an emerging tradition and a counter-canonical and insurgent postcolonial discipline fitting to be classified in the same category as other postcolonial disciplines in African humanities such as African literature, African philosophy, African religion, African anthropology, African history, African archaeology, African music, and African art. This article is an attempt to expatiate on this thesis. It aims to demonstrate that continental African psychology is a legitimate, autonomous, and self-determinative postcolonial discipline endowed with its own definable epistemological, philosophical, and methodological traditions to psychological scholarship. The basic idea of the article is consistent with the view credited to Guba and Lincoln that social science scholarship ‘needs emancipation from hearing only the voices of Western Europe, emancipation from generations of silence, and emancipation from seeing the world in one color’ (p. 212), and in the context of this article, in one psychology.