Mastery and Discovery in Black/African Psychology

Although psychology as a discipline has a lot to offer, if not applied well, it has the potential to do more harm than good. For instance, in South Africa, psychology was used as an instrument prior to the 1994 democratic elections to reinforce apartheid policies, which protected and served the needs of the Whites in particular. Psychological assessment practices in South Africa were employed to defend the exploitation of Black labor and to deny Black people access to education and economic resources (Nzimande, 1995). At an international level, numerous authors have used psychology to advance their ideologies at the expense of the Black Africans. For example, G. Stanley Hall, a renowned first president of the American Psychological Association, asserted that “Africans, Indians, and Chinese belonged to adolescent races in a stage of immature development” (in Durodoye, 2003, p. 11). Stewart (2008, p. 12) warns us that “counselling indigenous individuals from a non-indigenous perspective (i.e., Western perspective) is a form of continued oppression, as it does not legitimize the indigenous cultural view of mental health and healing.” Since the brutal extraction of African people, colonialism continues to attempt to eradicate, misappropriate, and invalidate the collective wealth of knowledge, tradition, values, identity, and insurmountable power of African people and culture. As an African in America, attempting to reclaim the power of being and becoming a healer of the spirit—or in Western terms, a psychologist, therapist, and so on—one is charged with the task of first acknowledging the purposeful degradation of Black/African psychology and the internalized devaluation of Black psychology from Africans and those of African descent. The process of reclaiming the value of the utility of Black psychology, specifically as a student, is metempsychic in nature, as for the first time one will become reconnected with their African ancestry through truth that has long been suffocated by the cincture of colonialism and apartheid, internalized oppression, and limited access because of the residuals of slavery. The now cumbersome task of holding, using, and maintaining the knowledge of African beliefs, practices, and treatments as they are intended for people of the African diaspora, within the very educational institutions that continuously seek to invalidate and repudiate its very existence. In addition to being expected to “master” the standard of Western psychology within their educational institution, one must fight to forge a passage for their own journey of mastery and discovery in Black/African psychology as the true originally intended methodology of healing African people. Given that there are far more traditional practitioners than Western-trained mental health practitioners, especially in most African countries (Meissner, 2004), it seems pertinent that a collaboration with traditional practitioners (such as faith healers, divine healers, sangomas, inyangas, etc.) be forged. Research indicates that traditional practitioners provide culturally appropriate care that is linked to indigenous explanatory models of illness held by many South Africans (Campbell-Hall et al., 2010). The indigenous forms of healing (i.e., consultation to pastors, priests, and extended family members such as aunts and uncles) are sensitive to one’s culture and these methods serve as healing sources in times of distress and are easily accessible and not costly in comparison with Western psychological treatments. Present and future scholars working within the discipline of psychology have the opportunity now to take back the reigns from Western psychology to discontinue the crippling and illness of African people. As Black African psychologists, we cannot remain silent and embrace Western psychology with its false claim of universalism, for if we remain quiet, we simply adopt and maintain the status quo. Waldron (2010, p. 50) cautions us that

the notion that physical and mental illness are conceptualised and experienced similarly throughout the world is one of the many erroneous assumptions made about culturally diverse people around the world by some practitioners working within Western medicine and psychiatry. Every society embraces particular cultural theories or ideologies that set the parameters within which normal, abnormal and deviant behaviour is defined.

The shift from Western psychology to a more inclusive psychology that acknowledges and embraces African practices requires a move from the authoritarian Western universalism to the value of accountability. Achebe (2000) makes this point clear, that as Black African authors we should focus our scholarship on where we come from in order to address the inequities of global oppression and that African knowledge and value systems are as legitimate as any other. It is therefore our responsibility as emerging scholars, regardless of our ethnic backgrounds to be critical of the learning material presented to us. Our own practices and agencies working with people of African descent are reliant on us—the future generations, the seeds of our ancestors, and the keepers of the future to ensure the wellness and excellence of African people across the world.