Conceptualising personhood,agency,and morality for African psychology

Abstract

One of the functions of psychological science is to develop concepts for thinking about people and their well-being. Since its establishment as a scientific discipline in the late 19th century, psychology has developed concepts that are essentially rooted in the specific spatio-temporal context of Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. There is a growing ontological and epistemological awareness that psychological science and practices from WEIRD cultural spaces cannot be exclusively representative of the African experience. I draw from interpersonal violence research to discuss the concepts of personhood, agency, and morality from an African perspective and highlight their theoretical and practical utility for psychological science. Based on African communalism, I argue that an understanding of personhood, agency, and morality as culturally contextualised and socially intentioned phenomena is foundational to the advancement of heterogeneous practices of knowledge production in diverse contexts.

Keywords

African communalism agency morality personhood social intentionality

One of the functions of psychological science is to develop concepts for thinking about people and their well-being in diverse contexts. Since its establishment as a scientific discipline in the late 19th century in Europe, psychology has developed concepts that are essentially rooted in the specific spatio-temporal context of Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (what has been referred to as WEIRD; see Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) countries. Though psychological science has, since its inception, travelled across space and time, psychological concepts do not always adjust to the changes in place and time. This is because one of the distinctive features of human beings is their ability to organise their lives and environments according to context-specific cultural meaning systems (Cole, 1992). Every human culture conceives of human nature in its own terms (Nsamenang, 1995) and thus conceives of and produces knowledge about persons, their agency, and morality according to the embedded cultural meaning systems. Most mainstream psychological studies take the examples of knowledge about the person’s agency, morality, and regularity of their functioning and development in WEIRD settings as something absolute and given, and then use these examples as the only reference points on the basis of which knowledge in marginalised spaces is studied (Asmolov, 1998). In recent times, behavioural scientists have come under attack for routinely publishing broad claims about human psychology, cognition, and behaviour based on samples drawn entirely from WEIRD cultural spaces (Arnett, 2008; Henrich et al., 2010). The cultural worldview that informs the WEIRD psychological frame of reference is substantially different from African ideas, practices, issues, and social thought. In this paper, I engage with the question of “psychology’s epistemic project” in the context of a perspective on concepts of personhood, agency, and morality from the African worldview, and highlight their implications for psychological research and practice in Africa.

One of the key elements that differentiates cultures is the meaning they assign to being a person (Geertz, 1975; Markus & Kitayama, 1998). Sense of self and its related concepts, agency and morality, are part of the foundational concepts of WEIRD psychology. The self in Western culture is believed to be the final explanation for behaviour and is responsible for behaviour (Markus & Kitayama, 1998). From the WEIRD viewpoint, Geertz (1975) provides the most succinct and well-known definition of a person as:

a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic centre of awareness, emotions, judgment, and action organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background. (p. 48)

Thus, personhood, from WEIRD psychological scholarship, is understood as a personal experience of a single, unitary, autonomous being that is descriptively and metaphysically isolated from others and the normative and cultural structures of the community in which the person is enmeshed. This understanding of personhood is firmly rooted in the ontology and cultural background of individualism (Greenfield, 1994; Markus, Kitayama, & Heiman, 1997). Individualism is noted as a significant component of Western society (e.g., Guisinger & Blatt, 1994; Triandis, Bontempo, & Villareal, 1988), and it is believed to be a function of the Kantian individual and the importance of personal reason and free will (Markus & Kitayama, 1998) or the Cartesian differentiation of the self and the other (Lebra, 1992).

The notions of personhood, agency, and morality are so central to Western thought and mentalities that the cultural background of individualism, which informs mainstream psychological theorisations and practices, is founded on the view of a person (and agency) as independent and atomistic. For example, early forms of psychological knowledge in WEIRD contexts were laboratory-based, fixated with examining intrapsychic mental processes and attitudes of persons in abstraction from the sociocultural context in which people are embedded. These beliefs about personhood have persisted until today and still provide the infrastructure for psychological science and practice in many Western societies. In many Euro-American contexts, people are more likely to view themselves as independent beings and to dwell on their individual skills and personality traits to describe themselves (e.g., as an intelligent, easy-going, moral, and hardworking; see Markus & Kitayama, 1998, 2010). That is, traits such as intelligence, easygoingness, and morality or emotions such as happiness and depression are thought to be “inside” the person rather than conceived as external qualities and feelings that people engage with, participate in, or appropriate in their cultural environments. The conception of personhood and descriptions that flow from it are guided by a culturally prescribed mode of thinking in WEIRD spaces that valorise what Long (2016) aptly refers to as “governance of the self, by the self” (p. 430).

However, the WEIRD notion of a person as a self-contained and value-free moral agent in control of his fate and intentional actions appears alien to African Psychology and the ontology of communalism in which a person is not, and cannot be, separated from others and their surrounding social context. African philosophical, sociological, and psychological scholarship generally agree on the assumptions of the African worldview as primarily communal and normative based on specific values and meaning systems that guide the Africentric paradigm of knowledge and human functioning, mutatis mutandis (e.g., Adjei, 2017b; Assimeng, 1999; Gyekye, 1996; Ikuenobe, 2006; Mbiti, 1989; Nwoye, 2015; Verhoef & Michel, 1997). This article discusses the social intentionality of personhood, agency, and morality from an African perspective and identifies their implications for psychological theorisation. I will elucidate the African conception of personhood, agency, and morality as culturally contextualised and socially intentioned phenomena, with the aim to help forge a new conception of their role in psychological science and practices in both African and WEIRD cultural spaces. Rather than create the impression that there is a singular body of psychological knowledge in Africa, this paper conceives of the African psychological sense of personhood, agency, and morality as polyvocal, multilingual, multicultural, and pluriversal (see Ratele, 2017a) and yet grounded in the essentially communal nature of African historical and existential experiences.

The goal of this article is not to create a strict dichotomy between “Western” and “African” cultures, or WEIRD and African psychological theories about personhood, agency, and morality. Rather than a rejection of psychological knowledge in WEIRD cultural settings, or a celebration and valorisation of postcolonial African epistemological positions, the aim of this discussion is to demonstrate how the conception of personhood, agency, and morality as socially intentioned phenomena provides a framework to explain the African existential experiences and contributes to psychological science in postcolonial African and non-African contexts. The remainder of the paper is organised into four parts. First, I will present a brief review of contemporary discussions on the institutional conditions of academic psychology in postcolonial Africa to provide a relevant context for the discussions in subsequent sections. Next, the discussion focuses on the social intentionality of personhood in the African worldview. I will examine the ontologically communal nature of the African person and its implication for psychological knowledge production. After this, I present the social intentionality of agency from the African epistemic standpoint. Finally, the paper highlights the concept of morality as a socially intentioned phenomenon from the African cosmological viewpoint. In all these sections, I largely draw upon interpersonal violence research¹ to highlight how the African understanding of personhood, agency, and morality as socially intentioned phenomena creates ways in which psychological phenomena are framed and constructed in specific ways across space and time. I conclude by highlighting how the relational understanding of personhood, agency, and morality can be leveraged for psychological science and practice in postcolonial African and non-African contexts, and the value of such efforts in contributing to psychology’s epistemic project.

African psychology: A synoptic view of some contemporary discussions

Epistemology describes “the cultural beingness, practices and existential experiences” (Baloyi, 2008, p. 5) of people within a given sociocultural context. People in most societies have the desire to know, and thus have some form of knowledge which is defined by its own cultural structuring and “according to the specificities of its own environment” (Okere, 2005, p. 25). Psychological knowledge has always been an embedded part of the African existential, cultural, and historical experiences. However, African psychology (not psychology in Africa)² as a scientific discipline of African-derived knowledge and practices has recently emerged into the limelight. The delay in the development and evolution of scientific African psychology (and the dominance of Euro-centric psychology in Africa) has been attributed to Africa’s colonial contact with Europe (Nwoye, 2012, 2015; Obiechina, 1992). Most universities and research institutions in Africa started as offshore satellite campuses of colonial universities, where the contents of their curricula were developed abroad and imported to Africa (Nwoye, 2015). African psychology emerged as a postcolonial discipline to contribute Africentric knowledge towards resisting colonial representations of Africans, regaining the dignity of the African past and restoring the self-esteem of the African (Nwoye, 2018).

The impact of colonisation on the development, pace, and originality of African psychological science is still felt on the continent. Postcolonial Africa continues to be a net importer rather than a generator of psychological knowledge largely because it occupies an outlier position in the world of psychological science and has limited capacity to generate and share its own psychology (Nsamenang, 2007). In recent times, the crusade for the decolonisation and indigenisation of psychology in Africa has become widespread and continues to gain traction on the continent. A good number of scholars have made loud and persistent calls for the indigenisation of psychological science and practice in Africa (Akotia & Olowu, 2000; Andrews & Okpanachi, 2012; Carpenter & Kooistra, 2014; Nsamenang, 2007; Nwoye, 2015; A. K. Oppong & S. Oppong, 2012; S. Oppong, 2013, 2016; Ratele, 2017a). For example, Andrews and Okpanachi (2012) have strongly made the point that “African people should think creatively from within and produce knowledge that is more in tune with an African context rather than depending on books, theories, and approaches from elsewhere” (p. 85). Akotia and Olowu (2000) also point out that until Africans start developing their own theories and epistemologies, it will remain an exercise in illusion to attempt to really understand Africans and what gives meaning to the African people based on received psychological knowledge in Africa.

Generally, these crusaders are of two persuasions (Moll, 2007). There are those who share the view that psychology on the African continent and about Africans should be an indigenous area of study marked by distinct worldviews and lived experiences of the people of postcolonial Africa (e.g., Akotia & Olowu, 2000; Baloyi, 2014; Matoane, 2012; S. Oppong, 2013, 2016). The second group of crusaders are those who see psychology as a universal disciplinary practice founded on and concerned with the psychological affairs of Africans but whose claims appear to traverse cultures and race (e.g., Fanon, 1986; Nsamenang, 2007; Nwoye, 2015, 2017; Ratele, 2017b). Related to the second group are a few other African psychologists who are sceptical about the progress and focus of the decolonial movement (e.g., Long, 2016; Makhubela, 2016). For example, Makhubela (2016) has described the decolonial movement as “going nowhere slowly” because of its attempt at conceiving “the process of ‘decolonising’ as equivalent to ‘Africanising’ and the insistence of some African psychologists on ‘narrow localism and ethno-theorising’” (p. 1). In general, psychology appears more developed in English-colonised Africa than in the French-Portuguese-Spanish-colonised countries in Africa (Nsamenang, 2007). However, the present movement for the advancement of African psychology is dominated by psychologists and scholars in South Africa where the discipline of psychology, its legislation, and ethical codes are relatively well developed, comparable with most European countries (Wassenaar, 1998).

In response to the call for decolonising and indigenising psychological science and practice in Africa, there have been a few positive changes in the evolution and development of scientific psychology on the continent. For example, there has recently been the inclusion of the study of African psychology within the psychology degree curriculum of some African universities such as the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa; the University of Dodoma in Tanzania; and Kenyatta University, in Nairobi, Kenya, both in East Africa (Nwoye, 2018). The recent formation of the Forum of African Psychology (FAP) as a registered new Division within the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) and the successful organisation of FAP’s first-ever international conference at the University of Limpopo, South Africa, in March 2014 (Nwoye, 2017), is another positive step towards the development of African psychological science and practice for the advancement of the course of Africans. Despite these moderate positive successes, the discipline and practice of African psychology still remains a contested space as scholars and practitioners jostle for attention and space for their individual and collective conceptual and theoretical orientations. Significant variations in strategies appear on how to document the history; define the meaning; conceptualise the goals and orientations; and demarcate the theoretical, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries of African psychology.

While some African psychologists and scholars believe that a documented history of psychology in Africa is a good way to enable and sustain intellectual continuity (e.g., S. Oppong, 2017), a few others consider the conceptualisations, orientations, and goals of African psychology as a good starting point for the advancement of indigenous psychological science and practice in postcolonial Africa (Nwoye, 2015; Ratele, 2017a). For example, Nwoye (2014) argues that the various dynamics and complexities of African psychological beliefs, assumptions, and cultural practices, and the broad spectrum of work done by psychologists in Africa can be represented by an inclusive term, African psychology. He defines African psychology as the “systematic and informed study of the complexities of human mental life, culture and experience in the pre- and post-colonial African world” (Nwoye, 2014, p. 57). The umbrella term African psychology is used to imply that psychological science and practices in Africa are “grounded on the assumptions of a common African worldview and the Africentric paradigm (Nwoye, 2015, p. 97). He further suggests four goals to encompass the object of African psychology as an academic field of study and scientific practice: (a) theory development, (b) research and documentation, (c) critical engagement, and (d) clinical and professional practice (Nwoye, 2015). However, other psychologists assert that the advancement of Africa(n)-centred psychology will be impeded if African psychology is conceptualised as a singular and static body of knowledge instead of consisting of dynamic and diverse orientations (e.g., Makhubela, 2016; Ratele, 2017a). For example, Ratele (2017b) observes that African psychology is polyvocal, multilingual, multicultural, and pluriversal, and thus defines African psychology as encompassing “all of psychology done in and for Africa, by and about Africans, [and] by Africans and non-Africans (working on Africa)” (p. 273). Ratele (2017a) further argues that though the umbrella term African psychology can be employed to describe “the broad terrain of work conducted by psychologists in Africa, the territory is in fact divided into different epistemes, approaches, perspectives, and orientations towards two principal objects: psychology and Africa” (p. 317). Accordingly, Ratele (2017a) maintains that there cannot be one psychology in Africa, but rather four African psychologies, namely: Psychology in Africa (i.e., universal psychology); Cultural African psychology (culturally, metaphysically, or spiritually inclined Africa(n)-centred psychology); Critical African psychology (materially, politically, or critically focused African psychology); and Psychological African Studies (psychological perspectives on Africa as an object of study). In line with the manifold conceptions of African psychology, Ratele et al. (2018) have offered what appears to be an all-inclusive definition of African psychology to, as they put it, “clear up some of the conceptual confusions on African psychology” (p. 331). They define African psychology as psychology in Africa, of Africa, for Africa, from Africa, on Africans, by Africans, and for Africans.

Despite the apparent conceptual disagreement on African psychology, and the varied strategies in terms of how to respond to the call for the production of indigenised African psychological knowledge, the common thread is the dawning ontological and epistemological reality that psychological science, practices, and knowledge construction from WEIRD cultural practices and truth cannot be entirely representative of the African experience; that African psychology should situate Africa and Africans at the centre of psychological science and practice in Africa while recognising and valuing both the homogeneous and heterogeneous experiences of Africans (Ratele et al., 2018). The basic premise of the movement is the belief that psychology that works from a distinctly African ontology and epistemology could enrich theoretical visions and methodological strategies to extend the frontiers of the discipline in both Africa and WEIRD settings (see Carpenter & Kooistra, 2014; Nsamenang, 2007).

Most of the current discussions on African psychology have largely focused on documenting and defining the field and practice of African-centred psychology as a distinct approach to the study of specific areas of empirical phenomena. However, the object of African psychological study (the person) and the kind of phenomena studied have not been given much attention in most contemporary commentaries on African psychology. While I support the argument to advance an African-centred psychology; document its origins, evolution, and developmental trajectories; and delineate its focus and orientations, I believe that an important addition to the pursuit of African psychology is an understanding of African persons (the object of African psychology), their mentalities, action potentials, and moralities. The concepts of personhood, agency, and morality, as in the case of mainstream WEIRD psychology, have thus become foundational to the quest for charting a new ontological and epistemological course for African psychology because the science of psychology as a discipline is about people, their behaviours, and moralities. Understanding the African sense of personhood, the source of a person’s action potentials, and moral thinking is fundamental to the methodological, ontological, and epistemological considerations of not only the scientific discipline of African psychology but of psychology in general. As indicated earlier, this paper discusses the concepts of personhood, agency, and morality from the African worldview and highlights their implications for psychological research and practice.

Social intentionality of personhood in Africa

The concept of personhood and how researchers conceive of it is essential for psychological theorisation and practice. The theoretical focus of this section is to discuss personhood from an African viewpoint and highlight its implications for psychological research and practice. This section critically examines the indistinguishable, dialogical, and dialectical relationship between personhood and community in Africa. Personhood can be understood as the nature or essence of existence, the fact of being a person and possessing those qualities that confer distinct individuality or personality (Adjei, 2016). Personhood in Africa has social intentionality in the sense that it is relationally connected to pre-existing social forces by default of existence (Adams & Dzokoto, 2003; Adjei, 2018). The social intentionality of personhood is used in this paper to refer to the experience of the person as relationally connected to others in a network of embedded interdependence. The concept social, from the African perspective, conjures a much broader and deeper meaning than its everyday use in psychological research, particularly in WEIRD settings. WEIRD psychological analysis takes a more additive approach to the understanding and study of the concept social and society (Menkiti, 1984). In a WEIRD context, the term social is generally used to refer to more atomistic individuals acting together, while society or community is used to mean the aggregated sum of atomistic individuals comprising it. In contrast, the African view of social and society/community refers to a thoroughly fused collective (Menkiti, 1984). In Africa, the experience of the person as relationally connected to others and the community is not a value belief about how things ought to be, but rather, it is an ontological experience about how things are (see Adams, 2005). Thus, the concept social is used in this article to convey the African communal (collectively fused) sense of interdependence and belongingness.

The essence of existence, from an African standpoint, is social and normative (Adams, 2005; Adjei, 2016; Ikuenobe, 2006) because the communal structure (i.e., pre-existing communal forces such as a person’s extended family) creates a sense of community and emphasises life and social relations organised around communal welfare, responsibilities, obligations, interconnectedness, and solidarity (Adjei, 2015; Gyekye, 1996). Thus, personal identity in Africa is never separable from the sociocultural environment in which individuals are embedded (Hord & Lee, 1995), as individuals exist as persons, as members of a group, and as members of a community—all of which are constantly interacting and interpenetrating one another (Adjei, 2015). A person, in the African view, is defined with reference to her community. The person–community relationship in Africa is aptly summed up by a common African statement: “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am” (Mbiti, 1970, p. 141). Another traditional African concept that describes the person–community relationship and expresses the African philosophy of “I am because we are” is “Ubuntu.” Ubuntu describes the relational nature of personhood and humanity towards others—knowing one’s fellow human beings and taking a keen interest in their well-being. It is the awareness that a person is a person because of his inextricable and dialogical connection with others (Baloyi, 2008). Thus, Ubuntu is characterised by “a fellow-feeling for justice towards others” (Mangcu, 2008, p. 78).

The African sense of belongingness to the community and communal relations is so ubiquitous and significant that it is reasonable to think of people’s relationality as their primary unit of consciousness (see Markus & Kitayama, 1991, for a comparable analysis in an East Asian setting). Consciousness in Africa operates in three overlapping areas. People in Africa are self-conscious, communally conscious, and cosmically conscious. In all aspects of their lives, Africans feel at home within their lives, in their relationship with others in the community, and with a cosmic dimension of being. Thus, the self from an African worldview is experienced as ontologically, cosmologically, spiritually, and normatively connected to the community (Ikuenobe, 2006). These overlapping senses of personhood provide the foundation for the African conception of rationality and knowledge as well as well-being. This conception of personhood in Africa appears contrary to constructions of the self in WEIRD cultural spaces where a person’s sense of self and identity is believed to be located in the internal properties of inherently separate particles (Adams & Dzokoto, 2003; Geertz, 1975). While the African views the person as an entity in close interaction with the multi-faceted aspects of his or her world, the person in WEIRD spaces is conceptualised as a demarcated entity set off against the community (Geertz, 1975; Markus & Kitayama, 1998; Nwoye, 2006).

Being (becoming) a person or personhood, in African psychological thought, is achieved—it is a place to be arrived at in stages and over time and it must be won and defended through behaviours that align with the fundamental norms and ideals of personhood. The Yoruba of Nigeria use the word eniyan to mean “a person” (Gbadegesin, 1991). In the Akan language (the most widely spoken language in Ghana), the term for “person” is onipa. The word onipa is ambiguous as it reflects an important conceptual distinction between a human being—a biological entity—and a person—a social, moral, and metaphysical entity (Gyekye, 2011; Wiredu, 1992). While Wiredu (Wiredu & Gyekye, 1992) conceives of a person’s social, intellectual, and moral achievements as constitutive of personhood, such that personhood is a continuous property capable of degrees, Gyekye (Wiredu & Gyekye, 1992) holds the view that personhood is prior to and independent of these accidental acquisitions of a person. For Gyekye (Wiredu & Gyekye, 1992), personhood is a discrete property; one is a person because of what one is, not because of what the person acquires. Gyekye (2011) believes there is an implied morality and ethical presuppositions in the meaning of personhood in the way it is framed in Akan.

Personhood, in Africa, may be conceived as eluding a person when their conduct appears unethical and immature (see Menkiti, 1984). For example, the Akan statement ɔnnyɛ nnipa (“he or she is not a person”) and the Yoruba statement Ki I eniyan (“he or she is not a person”) both underscore the African conception of moral personhood (Gbadegesin, 1991; Gyekye, 2011). While the evaluative judgments contained in the statements may be descriptive, they are usually used in the normative sense to accentuate the dichotomy between the concept of a human being and the concept of personhood (Gyekye, 2011). Such an evaluative comment is passed to convey judgment of the moral and social standing of the human being who is regarded as falling short of what it takes to be a person (Gbadegesin, 1991). This implies that, in the African worldview, an individual can be a human being without being (becoming) a person or attaining personhood. As Gyekye (2011) persuasively and philosophically argues, “there are certain fundamental norms and ideals to which the conduct of a human being, if he is a person, ought to conform” (§ 4, para. 6) in Africa. Thus, being a person in Africa is something that one could fail or be incompetent at, as it is attained through incorporation and the learning of social and moral rules. The social requirement for becoming a person in Africa demonstrates that relationality and embedded interdependence is an ontological practice in Africa and considered intrinsic to a person. That is, the notion of a person as an abstract dangling personality who is not normatively shaped by the community to which he or she belongs does not make sense in many postcolonial African contexts (Menkiti, 1984). In the African epistemic worldview, the person is ontologically part of the social firmament as the dichotomy between the individual and the social is indistinguishable. The African relationality should not, however, be conceptualised in categorical terms—it should not be understood as always denoting a positive good for the African person. Relationality should rather be viewed as able to engender and afford both positive and negative interpersonal relationships.

The African conception of personhood has implications for psychological science and practice. For example, psychological phenomena such mental health, interpersonal aggression, enemyship, friendship, and suicidal ideations have been empirically studied and associated with communal self-perceptions and embedded social referencing in Africa (see Adams, 2005; Adjei, 2017a; Osafo, 2012). The relational ontology of personhood (sense of connectedness) as conceived within the African worldview, influences well-being and mental health (Osafo, 2012). The relational sense of personhood in Africa goes beyond structural and subjective dimensions to capture the spiritual dimensions as well. That is, people do not live interdependently and derive belonging, warmth, respect, value, meaning, and purpose, but they also desire to experience a sense of transcendence by maintaining harmony and unity with an ultimate being. Thus, connectedness serves as the glue that holds the self, others, nature, and God in cosmological balance. As long as this balance is maintained, in the worldview of the African, there is wellness and mental health (J. Andoh-Arthur, personal communication, January 1, 2015).

The social intentionality of personhood has important implications for understanding gender-based violence in Africa. For example, while women may continue to stay in abusive marital relationships by subjugating their commitment to self-expression to the communal and familial value orientations (Adjei, 2017a), men who perpetrate violence toward their wives in marital relationships may do so by aligning with other men in ways that reflect their inter-subjectivity and socially intentioned sense of personhood (Adjei, 2016). Intimate partner violence (IPV) toward women has been constructed by male perpetrators as a demonstrative response to repair a perceived social injury caused or likely to be caused to men’s pride and masculine ego (masculine sense of self). The implication is that perpetrators of IPV in Africa seem intuitively aware of imagined relational gazes and evaluative scrutiny of other men, women, and children, perceiving them as assessing men on a masculine scale. The anxiety of IPV perpetrators about third-party beliefs resonates with the cultural affordances of embedded interdependence in Africa, and an interdependent sense of personhood as an object of other people’s attention (Adjei, 2016). Thus, masculinity (men’s sense of maleness) in itself may not influence partner aggression the way it is usually portrayed in WEIRD psychological and sociological theorisations (see, e.g., Connell, 1995, 2005; Kimmel, 2001), but rather, it is the complex relationship between perceived threat to normative masculine ideals (the communal self) and perpetrators’ imagined social evaluations by others that influence husband-to-wife violence in Africa (Adjei, 2016). The beliefs and expectations of third-party social evaluations and enforcement of culturally appropriate masculine behaviour represent one of the elaborate cultural and psychosocial mechanisms by which some men in Africa (Ghana) perpetrate IPV (Adjei, 2016). The implication is that an understanding of persons and how they are socially enabled and circumvented within a given cultural ecology contributes to our understanding of the behavioural patterns of victims and perpetrators of gender-based violence in varied cultural meaning systems.

The relationality of the African person engenders public self-consciousness, which has been termed as objective self-awareness—the tendency for people to feel that they are under intense social evaluative scrutiny by others (Adams, 2005). The objective self-awareness in Africa has been associated with the psychological phenomenon of enemyship—defined as a personal relationship of hatred and malice in which one person wishes for another’s downfall or attempts to sabotage that person’s progress (Adams, 2005). While some observers have attributed the phenomenon of enemyship in West African worlds to ignorance or superstition (see Jahoda, 1969, 1970), others believe that it is a reflection of paranoia or collective psychopathology (Parin, Morgenthaler, & Parin-Matthey, 1980). In a series of studies using both ethnographic interviews and brief written surveys, Adams (2005) observed that although the psychological experience of enemyship is typically absent from social discourses in WEIRD spaces (North American worlds), the phenomenon of enemyship is prominent in material culture and social discourses across a variety of West African worlds. People across diverse West African contexts are more likely to report being the target of enemies, report fewer friends, and express greater caution about intimacy than do people across diverse North American (WEIRD) settings (Adams, 2005; Adams & Plaut, 2003). Adams (2005) concluded that the prominence of enemyship in the West African cultural context reflects Africans’ relational understanding of personhood and embedded interdependence. Rather than a psychopathology, superstition, or ignorance, the experience of enemyship in African settings is a manifestation of the African belief in the person as the object of other people’s attention. Thus, the difference in the experience of enemyship in postcolonial African and WEIRD spaces lies in the differences in their understanding of personhood.

Another implication of the communal self is that it promotes the entrenchment of what has been called the economy of affection (Hyden, 1983). Economy of affection is a type of peasant economy where people count on the support and assistance of others, usually wealthy relatives, in-laws, friends, and friends’ friends, in handling personal or family projects they cannot finance alone (Hyden, 1983). The economy of affection has the potential danger of putting pressure on persons in leadership positions, both in school or non-school settings, to embezzle public funds to meet the demands for assistance and support from relatives and friends (Nwoye, 2006). The kind of network of interaction and dependencies which form the basis for the economy of affection is in sharp contrast with what occurs in WEIRD settings of North American worlds where “the common currency is that of a service for a fee” (Strupp, 2000, p. 111). The African communal self is so pervasive that when it has to be subordinated to personal choices and actions, it could create social fracture and even personal discomfort (Adjei, 2017b). These exemplars of African interdependence and communalism reflect the particularities of knowledge, African psychological experiences, and how a particular indigenous understanding of personhood contributes to the diversification of psychological concepts across different cultural contexts. It is important to note that persons in WEIRD settings also experience themselves as interdependent. The primary difference, however, is that interdependence in Africa is understood in the context of duties and obligations of a person to the collectively fused community while the WEIRD understanding tends to be located within the postulation of individual rights in the aggregated sum of discrete individuals who constitute the community. The African communal sense of personhood may thus describe interdependent experiences much better than WEIRD views currently do.

Social intentionality of agency in Africa

One fundamental element that shapes thoughts and behaviour of people in all contexts is agency—intentional action or the experience of one’s self in action (Markus & Kitayama, 2004). The question that has engaged researchers and policy makers over several decades is how to explain intentional actions of people. From armed robbery, terrorist attacks, gender-based violence, academic achievements, to environmentally friendly actions of separating trash, research scientists and policy makers are constantly trying to understand whether people who engage in specific acts freely self-initiate them or they merely act in response to societal/cultural and institutional demands. Most WEIRD psychological theorisations view the central problem of explaining intentional actions as that of balancing free will or personal freedom and responsiveness with societal requirements. These theories often emphasise freely given intentional actions as the optimum and healthiest form of human agency, while pathologising individual actions that are sensitive to and integrate themselves with social relations. In recent years, researchers mostly in the field of cultural psychology, have articulated the role of agency in culture as a way of developing a more cultural view of psychology and revising mainstream psychology’s focus on behaviour as less social and more personal (Ratner, 2000). In the discussions below, I examine the dominant polarity of agency as reflected in (cultural) psychological accounts, and argue for an Africa(n)-centred, socially intentioned view of agency that overcomes the limitations of both extremes. The implications of the socially intentioned forms of agency for psychological science in Africa are also highlighted.

The two dominant but opposing perspectives of agency in psychological accounts are the subject position and self-creating view. The subject position view of agency explains intentional actions and choices of individuals as given to them by social, historical, and/or biological forces, subjecting the person and determining his or her action potential (Bamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin, 2011; Davies & Harré, 1990). This view further upholds that a person’s social environment and embedded dominant discourses in a given cultural context determine the direction of a person’s action potential. This view essentially recognises human agency as a social phenomenon which depends on and needs social relations to be realised and objectified (Ratner, 1999). The self-creating view of agency, on the other hand, emphasises consciousness and free will in which the human subject creates itself, and is capable of making independent decisions and agentively engages in both world and self-making (Bruner, 1990). This is the view of agency in which the person is abstracted from social context and considered as the centre of his or her own awareness and intentional actions (Adjei, 2018). That is, persons are agents, having the free will to actively and independently engage in the construction of their own lives. From this perspective, agency is construed as less a social and more a personal attribute. Though this view recognises the existence of social institutions and conditions of life as well as customary and normative actions, these social structures are regarded as having no or little influence on the individual and her action potentials.

Agency has also been noted to reflect given cultural-psychological ecologies, structural social situations and norms in which individuals are embedded (Adams, Bruckmúller, & Decker, 2012). For example, through extensive study of participants in East Asian and American cultural settings, Markus and Kitayama (2004) identified disjoint and conjoint models of agency as reflecting independent and interdependent cultural ecologies respectively. In the disjoint model of agency, which is associated with independent construction of self in WEIRD spaces, people experience action as the product of discrete actors abstracted from social context. On the contrary, the conjoint model of agency, associated with interdependent construction of the self (such as in Ghana, see Adams, 2005), is a form of agency in which individuals experience action as a joint product of contextualised actors in concert with relational forces. In more recent times, agency has been viewed in psychological research in postcolonial African and WEIRD contexts as negotiated (Adjei, 2017a; Jazvac-Martek, Chen, & McAlpine, 2011). Negotiated agency involves engaging in joint decision making and being responsive to expectations and demands of relational others in a network of interconnectedness (Adjei, 2017a). Apparently, the subject position, the conjoint, and the negotiated view of agency all conceptualise human actions (agency) as culturally contextualised and intentionally based behaviour whose realisation depends on social referencing.

For both WEIRD and African (and many Asian) settings, it can be realised that there are two fundamental but opposing senses of agency: an agentic sense of self that is manifested in self-assertiveness and self-protectiveness, and a sense of selflessness (communal self) that is expressed in a person’s desire to become one with others (Markus & Kitiyama, 2004; Nwoye, 2015; Spence, 1985). People in theses settings are confronted with the challenge to reconcile and balance these conflicting senses. While people in Western societies resolve this balance by shifting toward the individualistic sense, exemplified in personal freedom and choice, people in the African cultural context and many Asian societies such as Japan emphasise the selfless sense of self in which the communal takes precedence over the individualistic (Adams et al., 2012; Adjei, 2018; Spence, 1985). It is often stressed in mainstream psychological accounts that agency is more highly developed in WEIRD cultural settings than in “majority-worlds,” to the extent that being agentic is almost always synonymous with individualism (Miller, 2007). The self-creating view of agency, predominant in WEIRD spaces, is often valorised and believed to ensure self-fulfilment and life satisfaction (see Diener & Suh, 1999). This is illustrated in survey items designed to elicit individualistic and collectivistic values. For example, a widely used Values Survey developed by Schwartz (1994) employs items such as freedom, choosing one’s goals, an exciting life, and independence to tap individualistic values while items such as being obedient, honouring parents and elders, self-discipline, and ensuring family security are used to tap collectivistic values. In this value framework, individualistic value orientations are characterised by variables associated with agency such as freedom, choice, and living an exciting life, whereas the emphasis on values such as obligation and control, that are associated with less developed forms of agency that reflect a world-to-person direction of control, are treated as definitional of collectivistic values (see Miller, 2007).

From this perspective, the prevalent cultural ideal of interdependent settings which places emphasis on balancing individual autonomy with responsiveness to the expectations and requirements of a person’s community is assumed to be a less developed form of agency as it deviates from Western views of agency. Rather than being conceived as a less developed form of agency, personal agency in postcolonial Africa (and other non-WEIRD postcolonial settings) should be understood as involving normatively situated and intentionally based action. An understanding of the source of a person’s action potential has huge implications for gender-based violence, particularly with respect to the agency of victims of IPV. For example, the conception of human agency as originating from an independent autonomous self or being constituted by a person’s internal motives leads to the most frequently asked pair of questions in the literature on gender-based violence: “Why do victims of IPV stay?” or its equivalent, “Why don’t they leave?” (cf. Adjei, 2018; Semaan, 2004). Despite being legitimate and logical, these questions inherently imply that staying in a violent relationship is a personal decision, a choice that victims of IPV freely exercise (Adjei, 2018). These individual-focused questions are asked to invariably equate staying-and-not-leaving violent relationships with failing to act on one’s own behalf (lack of agency) and/or being passive (Semaan, 2004). Thus, the atomistic view of self and agency leads to an analysis of IPV victimisation in dichotomous terms—you are either a victim or an agent. This all-agent or all-victim conceptual dichotomy in which agency and victimisation are each known by the absence of the other—that is, a person is either an agent if he or she is not a victim and a victim if he or she is not an agent—may create problems for IPV endurers in many societies (Mahoney, 1994).

This view is at variance with the analysis of IPV victimisation in interpersonal violence research in sub-Saharan Africa where the nature and source of intentional actions is socially negotiated (intentioned) in the sense that socially important others and institutions, and relationship with those others and institutions are focal and necessary for all normatively good actions. In these cultural spaces, IPV endurers exercise personal agency in a given relational context because agency is conceived as partly constituted by family relationships and identities. For example, Adjei (2017a) provides empirical accounts of how personal decisions and actions (personal agency) of abused women are subordinated to the requirements of the collective value orientation of the extended family to remain entrapped in a violent marital relationship. Based on the socially intentioned analysis of agency, Adjei (2018) further provides accounts of how abused women in Africa act in ways that illustrate their personal agency and social embeddedness. Rather than freely constructed, people’s intentional actions in many interdependent societies may be both enabled and constrained by the community. Psychological theorisations about intentional behaviour stand to benefit greatly from the African communal perspective on agency in which individuals act agentively, and yet their agentic actions arise from their sense of duty to and the expectations of their community. This communal understanding of agency can be leveraged to provide culturally sensitive explanations for intentional actions of people in WEIRD settings, including IPV endurers.

Social intentionality of African morality

Morality, the standard of right and wrong—like personhood and agency—has been primarily conceptualised in mainstream psychological theorisations as an individualistic enterprise based on universal, objective, rational, abstract, and systematic notions (Ikuenobe, 2006). For example, Kohlberg (1971, 1981) holds the view that the process of moral development is principally concerned with justice. The Kohlbergian theory assumed that moral development was universally applicable and valid for explaining morality of peoples in all cultures of the world; that the standard of right and wrong (justice morality) objectively exists. Morality, in this view, goes beyond mere socially accepted norms (Miller, 2007), as it distinguishes issues of morality from mere social conventions by formal criteria such as generalisability, impersonality, unalterability, and ahistorical qualities (Pool, Shweder, & Much, 1983; Turiel, 1983). Thus, moral rules as opposed to conventional norms are assumed to apply in all social contexts rather than depend on local customs and norms; viewed as not dependent on individuals or societal recognitions; and considered as not alterable by social consensus and as historically contingent (Miller, 2007). As an individualistic enterprise, Western morality addresses the question: “how ought a person (the individual) behave?” Ikuenobe (2006) explains that moral philosophy in WEIRD cultural spaces is seen as the activity of providing some basis on which an individual can rationally and autonomously think for himself in order to decide how he should act. While the dominant WEIRD view assumes that issues of morality (such as harm, violence, justice) have the same fundamental meanings and are categorised in the same terms universally, the categorisations may differ depending on meanings and practices embedded in specific cultural and psychological ecologies (Miller, 2007).

Morality has specific meanings in particular contexts and situations in African societies (Verhoef & Michel, 1997). Generally, morality in Africa has social intentionality in the sense that it is normative and rooted in what the group (community) specifies as acceptable more than what an individual autonomously thinks. Within the African worldview, morality is not primarily justice morality that tends to focus on individual rights; neither are moral rules given in Kantian categorical imperatives and strict absolutes of right and wrong as is the case in WEIRD spaces (Verhoef & Michel, 1997). The foundation of African morality is in social relationships (communally intentioned morality). The people in African traditions do not engage in abstract theorisations or linguistic and conceptual analyses of moral notions devoid of practical human circumstances and existential experiences (Ikuenobe, 2006). Rather, moral thinking in Africa is contextual, particularistic, practically normative, and applied (Ikuenobe, 2006). From an African perspective, it is not important to examine how moral notions such as justice, freedom, or equality ideally ought to be applied based on logic, but rather, moral notions are examined and applied in terms of practical relevance. This does not necessarily suggest that Africans are not capable of engaging in such abstract linguistic moral analysis. Rather, this universal view of moral concepts is regarded as an unfruitful enterprise, lacking practical relevance to the cultural and existential realities of the people (Ikuenobe, 2006). African morality is embedded in the conception of acceptable social relations and attitudes of the members of the society, and in the forms of behaviours that are regarded by the members of the community to engender social harmony, cooperative living, justice, and fairness (Gyekye, 2011).

The African moral system is preoccupied with human welfare and organised around the fulfilment of obligation to kinsmen and neighbours and the desire to live in amity with them (see Gyekye, 2011). This is a form of morality which neither originates from any absolute standards of right or wrong, or from honesty or truth; nor aims to reach any universal status. Rather, African morality originates from and orients towards the communal good. Thus, the standard of judgment, what constitutes good or bad behaviour, is defined in terms of a person’s duties to the community and human existential situation. As McVeigh (1974) points out, the good, in African moral thought, is that which receives the community’s approval and the bad is that which is disapproved. The good builds up society and the social structure; the bad tears it down. One is communal; the other is anti-communal. Moral assessment of behaviour in Africa takes into account variables such as who did what to whom, under what circumstances, and what were the consequences (Verhoef & Michel, 1997). The social intentionality of morality here suggests that morality, in traditional African societies, reflects the dynamics of social positions or status hierarchy in the sense that moral expectations of the community—what the community expects of a person—reflects one’s status in the community. Thus, a person’s role, age, gender, and kinship, among others, may influence how right or wrong one’s actions are judged.

The communally oriented view of morality significantly informs psychological knowledge and practice in postcolonial Africa. For example, in most societies, violence against one’s spouse is generally regarded as morally reprehensible and unjust treatment. This makes it logical for endurers of spousal violence to assert their legal or individual rights in court or any institution constituted for adjudicating such disputes. This principle of moral autonomy, as related to the individualistic view of agency explained earlier, has sometimes been applied to erroneously assume that endurers of IPV who remain with their abusive partners may have themselves to blame as they fail to exercise their moral autonomy to flee abusive homes. This assumption is based on justice and individualistic morality of the West which regards the decision to stay or leave a violent relationship as a personal decision based on the freewill of a moral agent. Though violence against a partner in a marital relationship is suffered by an individual, the morality of the abuser’s violent behaviour and the endurer’s decision-making process to stay or leave in Africa involves collective interaction and interconnectedness (see Adjei, 2015, 2017a, 2017b). The collective experience and morality of the extended family guides individual endurers of violence in negotiating appropriate stay/leave decisions in abusive marriages. During such collective decision-making, many moral issues are raised. For example, why did the man beat his wife? How many children are involved in the marriage? Does the family of the wife have past history of divorce for women? What is the social status of the family in the community? What are the potential social consequences of divorce to the image of the family and the person involved? Depending on the dynamics of the situation, the family and the badwafo (i.e., assembled members) might decide that the endurer of violence stays, while asking the perpetrator to apologise to her and to offer her some mpatadeɛ (appeasement) as a token of conciliation. The ultimate aim of such institutionalised and collective decisions is to prevent divorce and to achieve social equilibrium in the community and within the family. Thus, though individual abused women are moral agents with rights, they may have to subjugate their moral agency and individual rights to the collective morality and demands of their family to achieve social harmony. The socially intentioned and humanistic basis of moral assessment of conduct is preferred in the African moral system because moral behaviours have consequences for communal welfare and interests. The social intentionality of postcolonial African moral discourses may resonate with the moral discourses in many other non-WEIRD postcolonial societies. For example, in India, the Hindu theory of morality expressed in the notion of dharma (a righteous action defined by social and personal obligations), requires individuals to subordinate personal needs for the good of one’s family or society, failure of which may be regarded as immoral, even if the failure was due to personal advancement (Chaudhary, 2012). The contextual and situational nuances of the communal view of morality in postcolonial Africa provide a conceptual framework for psychological science and practice, and for understanding the moral actions of people in other cultural ecologies.

Conclusion

The world in which we live today has become interconnected. Processes of globalisation are fast drawing people from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds into close relationship. The foundational concepts of personhood, agency, and morality in WEIRD psychological accounts have emerged as a result of engagement with specific historical and socio-cultural contexts. To contribute to a more global understanding of these concepts and psychology’s epistemic project, this discussion has looked at the African cultural space for insights about alternative forms of human experience and understanding about personhood, agency, and morality that are typically silenced from mainstream accounts. Psychological functions and processes in Africa depend upon real communal life and bear its imprint. The sociality of personhood, agency, and morality is a significant part of African epistemology and forms the basis for African consciousness, which gives form and direction to thought and behaviour. The African relationality is formed in the crucible of concrete communal and existential activities such as work, education, religion, and family life, and reflects the distinctive communal orientation of Africa’s psychological episteme.

Given that much of contemporary life is lived in a diverse and globalised environment of culture and technology in which psychological science and practice seek to offer solutions to the myriad challenges facing humanity, rethinking the concept of personhood, agency, and morality from an African perspective may contribute to the heterogeneous practices of knowledge production in their cultural, historical, and societal embeddedness. The analysis presented in this paper not only illuminates the extent to which psychological science can benefit from African epistemological and ontological standpoints of personhood, agency, and morality, but it also highlights the crucial need for psychological knowledge and practices to move from the assumptions of human universals (see Henrich et al., 2010; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Norenzayan & Heine, 2005) to a set of assumptions, concepts, methods, and practices that are based on multicultural, multidisciplinary, and indigenous epistemic foundations (Marsella, 1998). This requires innovations and new understanding beyond the current contextualisation of psychology in a specific spatio-temporal setting. African knowledge and social thought are so embedded in such non-WEIRD sources of knowledge as folklores, proverbs, idioms, and spirituality that it may require what Nsamenang (2007) refers to as “culturalisation of methods and assessment techniques” (p. 16) that can aptly measure African concepts for psychology’s epistemic project in diverse societies. One strategy is to include the Africentric understanding of concepts such as personhood, agency, and morality in the corpus of psychology’s knowledge base to supplement the conceptual repertoire of mainstream psychology and serve as a conceptual framework for psychological research both in Africa and WEIRD contexts. The relational understanding of personhood, agency, and morality can also be leveraged for psychological science and development in both Africa and WEIRD spaces. For example, psychological scholarship can appropriate Africentric terms such as “Ubuntu,” which emphasise person–community relationship, as important conceptual tools to describe systems, people, and actions in both WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultural contexts. Another way to achieve a more progressive and culturally inclusive psychological science is to ensure that psychological concepts developed in both Western and postcolonial Africa coexist and enjoy enduring mutual respect and equitable participatory presence in psychology curricula and textbooks in Africa and Euro-American research institutions (see Nwoye, 2018).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Professor Estrid Sørensen and Professor Lotte Huniche, as well as the anonymous reviewers for reading and making valuable critical comments that significantly shaped the manuscript to this final work.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Stephen Baffour Adjei

Notes

Author biography

Stephen Baffour Adjei is a Social/Cultural and Human Development Psychologist. Dr. Adjei is a Lecturer at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Faculty of Education and Communication Science, College of Technology Education, Kumasi, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana and a research fellow at the Centre for Suicide and Violence Research (CSVR), Department of Psychology, University of Ghana, Ghana. He applies his research to understand the interactional complexities between culture, context, and psychological processes, with a particular emphasis on interpersonal violence, human development and learning, agency, and identity. He has taught, carried out research, and directed programmes at universities in Africa and overseas, including University of Aarhus, Denmark, and Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. He has published several scholarly articles, some of which have appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Family Violence and Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

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