Advancing African psychology

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 antior postcolonial writers (Fanon, 1967; Nandy, 2009) as well as from other theoretical, philosophical, and activist 1166618 TAP0010.1177/09593543231166618Theory & PsychologyReview review-article2023