Continued hopes and frustrations

In May 1970 Noel Chabani Manganyi published a paper on hysteria among mainly African women in the South African Medical Journal (Manganyi 1970). In the same year he completed a doctorate in psychology at the University of South Africa (Manganyi 2013: 281). Depending on whether you accept or reject the idea of white men like Smuts and Wilcocks in Africa as African (taking into account that some of them may have been race supremacists and anti-black), Manganyi could be seen as the rightful father of African psychology, and the history of African psychology as beginning circa 1970. Knowledge produced by black scholars in psychology and other disciplines is indispensable. A need to draw out the ties and crossings between African psychology and black studies (as well as other fields such as African studies and cultural studies) also exists. But there is, in my estimation, a perennial danger of African psychology being conflated with psychology by black scholars. Even worse, African psychology can be relegated to studies on black people by black psychologists. Psychology by black scholars is linked, but not identical, to African psychology. African psychology is a much broader enterprise. Above all, African psychology is not a discipline. Since Manganyi began his work, there have emerged a number of radical and conservative black scholars in psychology. Black psychology students and psychologists have called for a relevant, appropriate, non-Euroamericancentred psychology for South Africa. In recent times, the call has become more insistent, and the debates more intense. It is true that these debates have also been characterised by prejudice, knee-jerk reactions, nastiness and apparent frustration. Despite that, the debates about African psychology, along with the demands for decolonisation and free education for university students, and the establishment of the Forum for African Psychology as a formal division of the Psychological Society of South Africa, have, as a call for papers in Psychology in Society stated, ‘reignited some of the old hopes and frustrations about psychology’ (Psychology in Society 2016: 1). The intensifying call for a transformed, decolonised, or African psychology ought not to be ignored. In my assessment that is what prevails: it is as if there is a hope that this demand for African psychology will go away, later if not sooner.