Abstract
Those working from within the liberation psychology paradigm strive to remould psychology so that it might be put to work for the task of liberation – a task with which most psychologists have, historically, been wholly unconcerned. In practice, liberation psychology tends to be porous, multiple, and under-resourced. Indeed, much of what we might think of as liberation psychology is not referred to as such by its practitioners. Surfacing liberation psychology, then, requires reading into its undocumented histories. In this article, we attempt to develop a picture of liberation psychology in South Africa (SA) by reading the archives of Mohamed Seedat, a pioneering practitioner of liberation psychology. Grounded in the working-class south of Johannesburg and underwritten by expansive global commitments to liberation, Seedat’s archive spans almost four decades, passing through many disciplines, communities, political traditions, and affective registers. We suggest that his archive offers us insights into the affective components of history, developing community praxis in apartheid and post-apartheid SA, and humanising knowledge-making. We conclude by reflecting on how liberation psychology archives like Seedat’s serve as under-appreciated resources for grappling with the psycho-political constitution of emancipatory struggle.
Introduction
The commemoration of 30 years of democracy in SA provides an opportune moment for reflexively engaging with psychology’s past. By thinking with the work of Mohamed Seedat, a leading figure in the discipline, we explore in this article a body of work developed at the margins of psychology. This work, we believe, offers a generative practice of counter-disciplinarity. In particular, Seedat’s pursuit of liberation over the last four decades models a transdisciplinary praxis whose promise is realised in a tradition of questioning disciplinary decadence and pursuing freedom through theoretical promiscuity (Gordon, 2014). To think with Seedat, we turn to his expansive published and non-published archive housed at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences where he worked through most of his career, eventually retiring at the end of 2023. By singling out Seedat’s work, we do not mark him as exceptional. Indeed, his practice has always been alongside others. Within this body of work, there is – like any body of work – myopias, unfinished fragments, and shortcomings. Nonetheless, Seedat’s longevity, sustained scholarship, and community practice provide a way into the history of liberation psychology in SA, a history that begins, but ultimately departs, from the discipline of psychology. Before outlining the stakes of our intervention, and to map our arguments in this article, we offer below a theoretical explication of liberation psychology and a psychology of liberation in SA.
Working in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s, Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Jesuit priest and social psychologist, began to develop what he called liberation psychology (Portillo, 2012). Liberation psychology, he argued, was not a branch or a field of psychology. It referred to an emancipatory paradigm from which to practice psychology. Inspired by liberation theology’s well-known maxim: ‘a preferential option for the poor’ (Beers, 1985, p. 944), Martín-Baró sought to develop psychological practice through the most pressing concerns of the oppressed so that the discipline of psychology might be reformulated and put to work for the oppressed (Martín-Baró, 1994). In this context, liberation psychology stands in stark contrast to mainstream iterations of psychology that have been forged through the colonial episteme and which are regularly drawn upon to manage, adapt, and/or pathologise those suffering under racial and patriarchal capitalism (see Kessi & Kiguwa, 2015; Pavón-Cuéllar & González Equihua, 2013).
For Martín-Baró (1994), liberation psychology orients psychological practice through an open-ended, non-determined, and always-becoming set of political commitments. He made it clear that liberation psychology must embody new horizons, a new epistemology, and a new praxis, all of which should distinguish it from mainstream psychological paradigms. He also outlined eight pragmatic values by which to define liberation psychology: denaturalisation; reorienting psychology; recovering historical memory; de-ideologising everyday life, problematisation; honouring virtues; conscientisation; sensitivity to power differentials; and praxis (Rivera, 2020). In these ways, liberation psychology is made accountable to the ever-shifting emancipatory needs, geopolitical specificities, and historical lineages of struggle (Malherbe, 2018).
Given the porousness and the variabilities of liberation psychology, excavating particular liberation psychology traditions can be challenging. In addition to the liberation psychology tradition pioneered by Martín-Baró in El Salvador, we see similar traditions in Latin America, Oceania, Ireland, SA, the Philippines, Palestine, the United States, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Spain, among many others (see, for example, Montero & Sonn, 2009). Liberation psychology has also been engaged through different emancipatory paradigms, and has taken seriously queer, ecological, disability, decolonial, anticapitalist, and antiracist struggles (see, for example, Comas-Díaz & Rivera, 2020). In looking at these different traditions, we find that there is no measure for discerning what liberation psychology is (it is perhaps easier to determine what it is not). Added to this, not all who practice what we might think of as liberation psychology understand their practice in this way. Much liberation psychology tends to go undocumented, or it is made unsustainable via a dearth of institutional resources (Reich et al., 2017). In light of this, archives offer useful, yet under-considered, fragments through which to recover and interpret different liberation psychology traditions (see Duncan et al., 2014; Pe-Pua & Protacio-Marcelino, 2000; Portillo, 2012).
In turning to Seedat’s archive, we look to a counter-establishment practice of psychology in SA which sought to embrace ‘patience, struggle, and determination’ (Seedat & Suffla, 2017, p. 428). While Seedat does not necessarily refer to his work as liberation psychology (although there are times when he does; see Seedat, 1997), he appears always to centre the psychological within political, spiritual, and epistemological struggles for emancipation (see, for example, Seedat, 2006b). In this, we find an oeuvre that roots psychology not in disciplinary doxa, but in a community-driven praxis.
In what follows, we provide a brief outline of how Seedat conceptualised his work against changes and continuations within SA’s socio-political milieu. We then turn to his physical and his academic archives to develop an understanding of how he practised liberation psychology in apartheid and post-apartheid contexts. Specifically, we engage with what Seedat’s archive tells us about feeling into history, developing community praxis, and rehumanising knowledge. It is not our intention to read Seedat’s archive hagiographically or uncritically. Rather, we hope to bring his archive into the present conjuncture so that we might learn from it and face it toward the crises of time.
As with any archival reading, ours is marked by biases and partialities that are influenced by our respective positionalities. Moreover, each of us has, in different capacities, worked alongside Seedat. There are moments when we engage with Seedat’s archive in his presence, and there are moments when we do so without him. We therefore do not stand entirely apart from the archival picture of liberation psychology that we develop. As the psychoanalysts teach us, even if ‘the picture is in my eye . . . I am also in the picture’ (Lacan, 1979, p. 63).
A liberation psychology tradition in South Africa
Before explicating a psychology of liberation in SA via Seedat’s archive, it is worth briefly noting the dominant modes of psychological inquiry against which this archive is set. Dominant iterations of South African psychology have tended to mirror the hegemonies of the social order in which they are situated (Suffla et al., 2001). Cooper and Nicholas (2012) outline how in early twentieth-century SA, dominant practices of psychology were initiated by white male psychologists committed to the settler colonial project. Later, during the apartheid era, dominant psychology – practised overwhelmingly by white practitioners in either English or Afrikaans – aligned ideologically and practically with the programmes of racial exclusion set forth by the apartheid government (which employed a considerable number of white psychologists). For example, psychological diagnoses and assessments were oftentimes explicitly racist, and were used to justify the hyper-exploitation of black workers and naturalise spatial apartheid (Seedat, 1998). Although dominant psychology in contemporary SA has been formally delinked from explicitly racist institutions, much of the discipline remains in ‘white hands’ (see Padmanabhanunni et al., 2022; Seedat, 1998), oftentimes aligning with the modes of individualisation, coloniality, and pathologisation that characterise dominant psychology the world over (see Seedat & Suffla, 2017). Importantly though, dominant psychology in SA has always been met with resistance led by black psychological practitioners. It is this tradition of resistance that we understand as forming part of SA’s liberation psychology archive.
Although Seedat (2014) makes connections between his conception of liberation psychology and Martín-Baró’s, there are some notable differences between them. Seedat’s liberation psychology owes more to thinkers like Bulhan (1985), Ngũgĩ (1986), and Biko (1978) than to Latin American thinkers like Fals Borda (1984) and Freire (2005) who influenced Martín-Baró and his colleagues (e.g., Montero, 2007). Moreover, the liberation theology which left its trace on Martín-Baró was comprised of Christianity and Marxism (Malherbe, 2018; Pavón-Cuéllar & González Equihua, 2013), whereas for Seedat, liberation theology was expressed through Islam and Black Consciousness (Seedat, 2006b; Suffla & Seedat, 2021). These differences can be rooted in space and time. Martín-Baró, a Jesuit priest, was inspired by socialist resistance to Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s (see Hollander, 1997), whereas Seedat’s work was influenced by how the Black Consciousness Movement relied on community programmes and political mobilisation to advance anti-apartheid struggle in 1980s SA (Alexander, 2023; Seedat & Lazarus, 2011).
Seedat (2010) pits liberation psychology against the Eurocentric and imperialist practices of psychology which, in SA, aligned with colonial conquest, missionary education, conversion and occupation, scientific racism, and eventually, apartheid rule (see, for example, Seedat, 1998). Liberation psychology, he wrote, should avoid being rendered ‘ineffective by the Euro-American ethnocentric, elitist, sexist social-sciences establishment’ (Seedat, 1997, p. 267). He insisted that liberation psychology must be invoked within contexts of emancipatory struggle if it is to be of use to those waging these struggles (Seedat, 2014).
In 1994, apartheid was formally dismantled in SA, ushering in a neoliberal era of racial capitalism (Alexander, 2023). This newly oppressive epoch served to reconstitute, rather than radically break from, the racialised and gendered nature of hyper-exploitation that marked the colonial and apartheid eras. Against this, Seedat (2017, 2021) insisted that liberation psychology in the country must continue to commit itself to a decolonising ethic that resists imperial extraction and neoliberal hegemony while making connections between various humanising knowledge practices across the Global South. He maintained that liberation psychology was to sustain itself through grassroots contestation as well as SA’s purported national democratic mandate (Seedat, 2012, 2017).
For Seedat, liberation psychology advances through the often-unacknowledged tension between liberation and psychology. Where liberation ‘is both a vision and the practice of freedom, a call to reflexive action, and an insistence on intellectual independence and self-affirmation’ (Seedat, 2014, p. 2), psychology has by and large sought to ‘naturalise extractive relationships, acquisitiveness, and accumulation, and privilege extreme notions of individualism and competitiveness . . . [while having] limited regard for social responsibility, collective transformation, and pluriversality’ (Seedat & Suffla, 2017, p. 423). Psychology, therefore, can be drawn from only insofar as it supports processes of liberation. In this, psychology must change so much so that it is barely recognisable, least of all to those invested in dominant psychology, or what Seedat and his colleague Shahnaaz Suffla call ruling psychologies (Seedat & Suffla, 2017).
On the eve of his retirement, Seedat reflected on the tensions between liberation and psychology, expressing his relief at exiting the university’s neoliberal protocols and market mandates, while also mourning ‘vacating a space located at the institutional margins and cocreated by a community of companions: peers, mentors, post-graduate students, dear friends, and activists working for a humanizing world’ (Seedat, 2023, p. 414). To work within institutions while remaining at a strategic distance from them can widen the scope for subverting bureaucratic dictates; carving freedom out from the breach of ever-narrowing spaces of creativity. This, we believe, exemplifies a practice of liberation psychology through its foundation tension. The point is not to ‘resolve’ this tension in any definitive sense, but to practice liberation psychology through it. To hold or stay with such tension can, however, be exacting, and the vision of a psychology loosed from its neoliberal protocols and stifling bureaucracies is likely to always be a vision betrayed. Thus, as we will see, practicing liberation psychology through its foundation tension often means stepping away from psychology altogether.
The ever-shifting demands of liberation mean that we cannot delineate the precise tenets of liberation psychology. Seedat (1997) teaches that we can only commit to a ‘yearning and quest for liberation psychology’ (p. 267), using psychology as a vehicle to transport lessons in the psycho-political that have been gained from histories of struggle. We make and shape liberation psychology within its ‘definitional troubles’ (Seedat, 2021, p. 138) that are attuned to political and historical conjunctures. Liberation psychology must, therefore, remain unattached to psychology and recognise the imperative to abandon psychology – including any concessions that psychology might offer to us – when the political moment calls for it. It is liberation, not psychology, that must be prioritised.
Reading Seedat’s archive
In their most conventional form, archives represent institutional repositories. However, we need not settle for such a parochial conception of the archive. We can, for example, read archivally the bodies and minds of elders, cityscapes, and shorelines, all of which carry memories and the marks of history (see, for example, Buchanan & Tumarkin, 2012; ka Canham, 2023; Pitts et al., 2020). Different archival forms filter experiences, knowledges, and ways-of-being (Stevens, 2017), grappling with the effects of history while also mourning its passing (Duncan et al., 2014). No archive is foreclosed. Archival readings are always contested and made through a politics of interpretation. Indeed, how we read the archive and what we understand as an archive informs how we situate ourselves in the present and how we relate to the past (see hooks, 2009).
Seedat’s archive, like all archives, interacts with and has been formed through other archives. Within his archive, we find explicit engagements with different African knowledge archives (Seedat & Suffla, 2017), as well as archives of Islamic humanisation that offer what he calls ‘decolonizing faith-based alternatives to secular psychology’ (Seedat, 2021, p. 136). Seedat also reads Black Consciousness philosophy and the Psychology and Apartheid Committee as counter archives within psychology (Suffla & Seedat, 2021). Seedat’s archive is indebted to these other archives and can in some ways be thought to represent an archive of archives. Any archival reading must, therefore, attend to such historiographic constellations.
Feeling into history
Seedat (2012) argues that a personal narrative approach is useful for breaking from orthodox, seemingly detached writing styles that imply a false segregation between the personal and the scholarly. Indeed, the narrative texture availed by a personal, descriptive register allows for a useful entry point into engaging with how Seedat’s archive activates affective connections with the past. Connections of this sort tend to be lost within the kinds of narrative linearity demanded by conventional historiographic accounts.
The year 2023 was to be the last of Seedat’s nearly 40 years working at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences (ISHS). In readiness for vacating his office, some of us joined him in sorting through the materials he had accumulated over the years. We write about this here. We include our observations of Seedat working through the materials. While we term this Seedat’s archive since he led this work, it is more accurate to categorise it as the ISHS community engagement liberatory archive. There are other archives which document struggles for liberation and memory across the Global South through what may be conceived as critical archive studies (Punzalan & Caswell, 2016). Among these, we count the Apartheid Archive Project (Stevens et al., 2013), which sought to document ordinary people’s accounts of apartheid, as well as the Aboriginal History Archive in Australia, which contains documentation related to Indigenous Australian self-determination (Christie et al., 2014). Seedat is therefore part of a community of Global South scholar-activists invested in a project of memory for liberation.
His is a considerable archive – largely without structure, though well-maintained. There is an ongoing effort to organise his archive and determine its scholarly relevance. It is a highly affective experience for those involved in sorting this archive, not least of all Seedat. There are memories locked into the various artefacts of history contained within this archive. Some of these memories have been deliberately forgotten. To sort and taxonomise these historical fragments is sensitive not because one fears undertaking this task incorrectly. Rather, one feels a duty to what is being archived; a commitment to honouring the ethos of the archived content. The archivers bear the risk of forcing symbolic frames onto work that has sought to push beyond the academy’s – and, indeed, psychology’s – stifling mandates and impositions. There is affective work in bringing an end to this moment within the archive and to giving this moment a particular form.
Academic papers, editing work, administration, memos, letters, community project outlines, funding proposals, newspaper cuttings and reports are neatly maintained in Seedat’s archive. Sentimental documents like his first pay cheque are laminated and securely stored. Correspondence with various collaborators and stakeholders points to seminal moments in his working life. There is a letter of correspondence from 30 years ago. The letter charges with history and bristles with age. Other documents which hold no immediate significance are reluctantly placed into storage. Now that journal search engines spew out articles in seconds, hard copies of well-marked articles are queued for recycling. Forty years truncated.
In reading various handwritten notes from the archive, such as faxes and correspondence with authors and publishers, there are reminders, both painful and joyous, of traversing the tensions inherent to putting psychology to the work of liberation. We find in this archive minutes taken from meetings with university management and from meetings with social movement leaders – with efforts to marshal the former’s resources for the political requirements of the latter. Moving further into the archive, we find a series of annual reports (published prior to the digitisation era) as well as various funding proposals which demonstrate how Seedat’s work was shaped by funding calls, but also how funding was used in subversive ways that responded to community needs with maximum impact. As noted earlier, Seedat (2023) has since reflected on occupying this liminal space of inbetweeness, one that strives to resist institutional affiliation collapsing into institutional interpellation. The fragments of Seedat’s archive point to a guiding principle of his liberation psychology practice: institutional commitments are meaningful only insofar as they enable us to act on our political convictions; with the requirements of formalised psychology honoured and passed through only inasmuch as they allow us to take up the demands of liberation. Yet another instance of practicing liberation psychology through its irresolvable foundation tension.
As we joined him in the work of sorting, we observed that peering into his archive, Seedat himself drew out newspaper cuttings of an article detailing the first traffic lights installed in Lenasia, a suburb in the south of Johannesburg. On one hand, this is a sentimental memory of the place where he was raised and where he works. On the other hand, it points to his preoccupation with safety and reduction of injury and mortality. Many of the road signs and traffic calming techniques in this region of the city were part of his collaborative advocacy work driven by an ethic of care for community. Seedat strikes an unusually tender chord in his research on traffic fatalities and crime, a field that too often loses itself in impersonal statistics (see, for example, Seedat, 2006a).
In observing Seedat among his work – disparate, scattered fragments of liberation psychology – one is struck by his identity as a living archive, an institutional builder who created incubators for difference and enactments of freedom. We refer to Seedat as a living archive because we can ask him to tell us about documents and experiences in the documents. His narration breaths life on the documents. From these twinned archives – paper and human – we may branch out to think with what they point to in relation to the preoccupations and political commitments of a psychology pressed into the service of liberation.
Articulations of community praxis
Seedat’s pioneering work in community psychology is well-known. He co-authored what may very well be the first scientific paper on community psychology in SA (see Seedat et al., 1988), and has, over the years, published many academic articles and special issues concerning community psychology. Moreover, since 2018, he has co-edited Springer’s Community Psychology book series with Shahnaaz Suffla. 1
Taken as a whole, this work coheres around an insistently Global South agenda that predates this geopolitical categorisation. In this corpus, we find onto-epistemic questions on how low-income communities might emerge as zones of thought, being and theory, as well as how the residents of these communities constitute theorists and not simply data points. This work is framed by what is sometimes referred to as a decolonial attitude (see Maldonado-Torres, 2017). Mignolo (2009) insists that The decolonial paths have one thing in common: the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally. Racism not only affects people but also regions or, better yet, the conjunction of natural resources needed by humanitas in places inhabited by Anthropos’. (p. 161)
Seedat’s work has taken up this idea that racism and its psychic wounds not only affect people but also regions (see also hooks, 2009).
We see traces of a pioneering iteration of community psychology throughout Seedat’s archive. Lying among the many folders that comprise the archive is one marked ‘6th International Community Psychology’. He and Suffla co-hosted the conference that brought the global community to collectively think about a psychology practised in the interests of people beyond the psychotherapeutic encounter. This was the first time that the conference had come to the African continent, and knowledge traditions from the continent were crucial to how community psychology was engaged throughout the proceedings. 2
There is another paper file in Seedat’s archive dedicated to editing the first community psychology textbook in Africa (see Seedat et al., 2001). There are four thickly packed folders that track the development of this textbook. Although published in 2001, the fax readings show that draft chapters were in circulation from as early as 1997. The book represented a pioneering attempt to begin to think global iterations of community psychology from SA. Naidoo (2002, p. 68) describes the book as ‘a major milestone in the history of psychology in SA, being the first indigenous volume devoted in large part explicitly to community psychology in the local context’. The availability of this book allowed teaching departments in and beyond the country to introduce community psychology as a critical stream of study, one that brought politically committed community engagement into psychology and, in so doing, transformed the practice of psychology along with national perceptions of which sorts of psychological work were relevant to the post-apartheid context (see Long, 2013). The book, in other words, pries psychological praxis from disciplinary doxa so that it might better serve community-led liberation.
In editing this textbook, Seedat and his consulting editors worked with 32 authors. In inviting these authors to contribute to the book, Seedat was building a critical mass of scholars committed to community praxis and potentially contributing to a cohort of people who would teach the book. In the correspondence between the various contributors, we find evidence of a pedagogic encounter between editor and author. A printed chapter titled ‘First Draft’ contains editorial scribbles in black ink. Another handwritten note to the authors observes the various questions I ask throughout the manuscript point to the value of this chapter for the book. The chapter is provocative and so promises to inspire many questions for the student reader. However, . . . it is necessary to deromanticize PAR [Participatory Action Research] and point to the various theoretical and practical challenges inherent to PAR; briefly expose students to the different strands of thought within PAR . . .
We see here an instance of the kind of academic labour that brought to fruition this book which has, itself, served as an important pedagogical archive.
Like Freire’s (2005), Seedat’s work rejects the singular logic of class or the monolithic entity of race and instead sees these forms of oppression as operating together. In the 2005 introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Macedo (2005) observes that Freire analysed oppression ‘through a convergent theoretical framework where the object of oppression is cut across by such factors as race, class, gender, culture, language and ethnicity’ (p. 15). Freire centred the struggle for humanisation. He observed that struggle is ‘possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed’ (Freire, 2005, p. 44). Read together with Freire’s insistence on humanisation, the intersectional lens has been pivotal for Seedat’s work. For him, humanisation through the promotion of peace has most closely attended to race and class, with a rootedness in communities of care being fundamental to driving political action (see hooks, 2009).
We see throughout Seedat’s archive a community-oriented liberation psychology driven by a commitment to the humanity of those who Fanon (1967) and Bulhan (1985) referred to as the damned of the earth. Such community-engaged praxis understands political liberation as always also psychological liberation (Seedat, 1997). As Seedat (2012) puts it: ‘In engagement as transformation, “dialogue”, “critical reflectivity” and “listening” seem to be means of taking action’ (p. 490). This does not mean that community engagement cannot be data-driven. It does, however, mean that community-engaged research must assume an action orientation that commits to compassionate ways of using science to mobilise solidarity (Seedat, 2006a) and, ultimately, assist in a decolonising process that facilitates an ‘ascent into humanity’ (Mbembe, 2021, p. 62). Knowledge for the sake of it is not enough. As Seedat writes, Creative immersion in the daily struggles for transformation and emancipation is characterised by a scepticism of knowledge developed in the sterile ivory-towers of academia and in insulated, self-serving, eurocentric knowledge “capitals” that stifle proactive engagement–in the name of scientific neutrality–and that deny vigour, hope, vision and direction–in the name of objectivity. (Seedat, 1997, p. 267)
Humanising knowledge
Coloniality is, in part, a knowledge-based project. Colonial violence has always depended on erasing particular knowledges to justify the dehumanisation and evisceration of the colonised peoples associated with these knowledges (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). For those situated in the liberation psychology paradigm, the point is to assert the epistemic virtue of those knowledge forms that coloniality has sought to erase (Seedat, 2017). In the years following the formal dismantling of apartheid, Seedat maintained that ‘psychology, as the progeny of the Euro-American ethnosciences, cannot transcend cultural and ideological barriers inherent in its theoretical and philosophical explications’ (Seedat, 1997, p. 261). This points us squarely to the issues of psychology’s relevance that were so important in the period of transition from apartheid (Long, 2013). Seedat contends that theories which engage the ‘life-world of those other-than-white, other-than-Euro-American, or other-than Judeo-Christian’ were necessary (Seedat, 1997, p. 266). It is with theories of this kind that we can begin to imagine beyond the white supremacist logics of coloniality (Seedat et al., 2021), and move towards what Césaire (1972) called a ‘humanism made to the measure of the world’ (p. 73).
Seedat’s academic archive is attuned to coloniality’s grip over psychological knowledge production, wherein context blind-universalisms and purported neutrality are firmly embedded in ruling class ideologies (Seedat, 2010). If ruling psychologies are diverse, they are so only by their own myopic standards (Seedat, 1998), with faith and political conviction almost entirely unwelcome in this epistemological landscape. In attempting to move beyond this epistemological crisis, Seedat (1997) charts four non-deterministic stages for a psychology of liberation to move through and between: (1) Disillusionment (a potentially debilitating acknowledgement of coloniality’s influence on psychology); (2) Reactive engagement (creative and critical services that challenge institutional hegemony and prioritise the needs of the damned of the earth); (3) Constructive self-definition (an attempt to locate psychological processes in political and economic spheres); and (4) Emancipatory discourse (a move towards becoming immersed in ongoing liberatory practice). In moving between these four stages, liberation psychology becomes part of the ‘unfinished journey of humanisation in the context of ongoing coloniality’ (Seedat, 2017, p. 528). Within Seedat’s academic archive, we find analyses of specific individuals who have, to varying degrees, undertaken this journey, including Nelson Mandela (Seedat, 2017), Steve Biko (Seedat, 2014), Wahiduddin Khan (Seedat, 2006b), and Thabo Mbeki (Seedat et al., 2021). We also find many uncelebrated examples of community actors who have taken this journey towards humanisation (see, for example, Suffla & Seedat, 2021).
The enactments of epistemological humanisation that we find in Seedat’s archive should not be read in a psychologising register. It is perhaps more appropriate to understand them as representing transdisciplinarity, whereby ‘epistemic openness and radical political receptiveness’ serve to break away from the disciplinary traditions that turn away from reality and retreat into themselves (Rabaka, 2010, p. 355). Seedat too often breaks out of the therapeutic encounter and the limitations of the didactic confines of psychology for us to rely on psychology’s static frameworks of mind and behaviour. In his final working years, his liberation psychology practice moves decisively beyond the terms of community psychology and towards what he calls ‘epistemologies of the heart’.
Aligning with Islamic scholarship, Seedat (2021) understands the heart as comprising the neurons that generate thinking, sensing, and intuiting – moving deftly between the Divine and the material. Epistemology of the heart, he argues, pushes back against strict disciplinarity and detached scientism by forging critical compassionate spaces in and beyond academia (Seedat, 2023). To know from the heart is to activate silence, stillness, voice, and action in accordance with the political demands of the moment; creating a language propelled by relationality and the connections forged between people and the world around them. For epistemologies of the heart, sensing and connecting to our shared vulnerability is made part and parcel of the liberatory process. We see epistemologies of the heart scattered throughout Seedat’s archive. They are alive in his caring correspondence with community actors, in the moving posthumous letter written to his mother, and in his repeated acknowledgement of the administrative staff who are indispensable to – yet almost completely ignored within – knowledge-making practice (see Seedat, 2006a, 2023; Suffla & Seedat, 2021).
Seedat’s humanising practices and conceptions of knowledge-making were not static. They passed through several disciplines and political traditions. They also moved between community and institutional spaces. We see evidence of this movement in the archive. Like any knowledge project, Seedat’s archive also contains blind spots, myopias, and omissions. For instance, more recent turns in liberatory work of this kind have taken up questions of feminist praxis, sexuality, and climate justice. Although it is apparent that we are admirers and beneficiaries of Seedat’s legacy, we note these omissions. Unlike the relatively recent emergence of queer and climate struggles, gender has long been a part of such liberatory praxis. We posit that many older scholars like Seedat may at times underappreciate certain axes of domination within their commitments to anticolonial and antiracist struggles. Gouin (2009), for example, warns that antiracism should always intersectionally attend to the feminist and anticapitalist imperatives of liberation. The omissions that we observe in Seedat’s archive point to some of these temporal and ideological influences that may limit the full utility of this archive. However, while these sometimes appear as absences and traces in some of his oeuvre, those of us who follow Seedat’s legacy are challenged to use his dogged commitments to liberation to more centrally confront patriarchy, homo and transphobia and the urgency of advancing environmental justice. Critical reflexivity compels us to learn from this archive, to face its lessons towards today’s struggles, and to build upon the ways by which it sits in and has acted on the world. In doing so, we begin to engage with the ever-shifting demands of psycho-political liberation (Montero, 2007).
An important part of Seedat’s commitments to humanising knowledge has been to walk alongside, in solidarity, and in accompaniment with others. These include community partners, scholarly peers, and extensive mentorship of younger scholars and practitioners. We suggest that a part of building liberatory practice is to develop the next generation of disruptive scholars who continue a legacy of questioning and probing beyond the confines of diagnostic manuals and bureaucratic strictures. The burgeoning number of disaffected psychologists who find shelter in community psychology, activist and advocacy work is in large part due to a cohort of older scholars among which we may count Seedat, N. Chabani Manganyi, Norman Duncan, Pumla Gobodo Madikizela, Saths Cooper, Sandy Lazarus, Toni Naidoo, and others whose own careers were forged in conditions of struggle for a liberated SA. Indeed, this moment of reflecting on the last 30 years of psychology may call for an engagement with the expansive archives of such figures.
Concluding reflection
Liberation psychology endeavours to lock into the hegemonies of the political moment in which it is practised and against which it reacts. This furnishes the liberation psychology paradigm with the sorts of dynamism and political relevance that mainstream psychology seems almost entirely unable to take up. To learn from liberation psychology – using it to understand our present conjuncture and to forge new, audacious visions of emancipation – requires that we look beyond written historiographies and towards the undocumented pasts contained within archives. In this article, we have taken up this task via a partial reading of Mohamed Seedat’s archive which, we believe, offers insight into an iteration of liberation psychology practised in pre- and post-apartheid SA. We show that such practice was advanced through an intensely emotional, community-oriented, situated, dynamic, liminal, and transdisciplinary set of commitments.
There are, of course, many other enactments of liberation psychology in SA and, indeed, throughout Africa and the Global South. We hope that the nascent and incomplete archival readings offered here will provoke further inquiries into other neglected liberation psychology archives. The point, we hope to have made clear, is not to develop clearly distinguishable formations of liberation psychology, but rather to excavate historically embedded understandings of what psycho-political liberation has demanded across space and time, and how people have broken from psychology’s institutional dictates to meet these demands.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors wish to acknowledge the University of South Africa and the South African Medical Research Council for the funding and institutional support provided.
