The paradox of "African psychology" 

Ian Moll 
Wits School of Education 


Paper to be presented to the Wits School of Education Research Seminar, 18 September 2007 

� given that the 'West' presents itself as the embodiment and inventor of 
the 'universal', we must protest even more loudly that its universal is so 
peculiar and that its global is so local. That is, the West, in constructing the 
universal, instead of truly embracing all that there is, or at least what of it 
can be so embraced, has merely puffed itself up and invited the rest of 
humanity � to be complicit in this historical swindle. (Taiwo, 1998, p.2, 
own emphasis) 

Between 1990 and 1991, the Journal of African Psychology changed its name to The Journal of 
Psychology in Africa. The editors conceived of the change of name as a compromise between 
two opposing scholarly tendencies amongst psychologists in Africa, namely the tendency to 'see 
psychology as a universal discipline whose [principles] cut across nations and cultures' and the 
argument that a specifically African 'culture, mentality and attitude influence[s] the application 
of psychological principles and explanation of observed psychological phenomena.' (Peltzer et 
al., 1991, p.xvi). The change was made, at least in part, in response to an eloquent appeal by the 
Cameroonian developmental psychologist, Bame Nsamenang (1990), in Volume 1:3 of the 
journal: 

The current fragmentation of psychology by identifying its 'variants' with 
particular peoples or geographic locales is unfavorable for evolving a 
coherent set of universally applicable psychological laws and does not 
support psychology's acclaimed status as a true science of the human 
organism, a global species. A modification in the title of the Journal of 
African Psychology � is suggested � (Nsamenang, 1990, p.1) 

Nsamenang's concern was with what, from the perspective of the optimum development of 
psychology in Africa, was more correctly to be qualified as 'African' - the journal or the 
discipline? Volume 1:4 subsequently appeared under the title Journal of Psychology in Africa. 
The present article is concerned with the underlying debate that the change of title sought to 
resolve: in any African context, is psychology best conceived as an indigenous disciplinary 
practice animated by the unique philosophies and lifeworld of the continent, or as a universally 
applicable set of theoretical propositions and research programmes grounded in and engaged 
with the issues of Africa? 


The resolution to this debate that will be supported here is consistent with that argued by 
Nsamenang (1990, 1992), that, ultimately, psychology is a universal rather than a local 
enterprise. However, arriving at this resolution is not a straightforward matter. We need to 
resolve a difficult paradox that manifests at a number of different levels, in order to understand 
the force of the argument that we cannot sustain the notion of an African psychology. The 
paradox will be discussed here in two different forms: 

1. 
The search for a distinctive African psychology turns out to be animated by images of Africa 
that originate and remain sourced in non-African discourses of cultural difference, whereas 
positioning psychology as a global discipline engaged in Africa permits particular African 
issues and problems to come to the fore in psychological research and practice. 'It is indeed a 
strange paradox', suggests the B�ninois philosopher, Hountondji, that a human science that 
portrays itself as uniquely African actually encourages 'a sort of collective cultural 
exhibitionism' which compels intellectuals in Africa 'to "defend and illustrate" the 
peculiarities of [their] tradition for the benefit of a Western public' (Hountondji, 1983, p.67). 
2. 
Exploring the paradox more deeply, it appears that the very debate about whether or not there 
is an 'African psychology' is but one version of an international/global/universal debate about 
whether knowledge systems in general are 'relative to' and 'constructed by' culture-specific 
forms of life, language games, paradigms, conceptual frameworks, interpretive communities, 
or whatever. So, to take the position that there is a unique African psychology, just as much 
as to deny the possibility, turns out to be not particularly African at all. 
In general terms, what this paper seeks to demonstrate is that there is no consistent African 
position on the possibility of an African psychology. Rather, there is a debate that takes place all 
over the world, including in Africa, amongst Africans, on the matter. The paradox is that, in 
resolving this debate, scholars from Africa and elsewhere will increasingly position African 
psychology as a necessary part of world psychology. 

The Debate 

In Africa, over the past decade, there has been a noticeable strengthening of the call for the 
indigenisation of psychology on the continent, evidenced for example in most issues of The 
Journal of Psychology in Africa. An ongoing debate about the 'African personality', which 
perhaps dates back in general terms to the rise of the Negritude and Ujamaa (African socialism) 
movements, and in strictly psychological terms to Fanon's (1986a, 1986b) psychoanalytic theses 
on colonial domination, was given new impetus by the rise of the indigenous psychology 
movement in the nineties. This movement is primarily concerned to overcome the perceived 
limited relevance of Euramerican psychology to 'third world' issues. It opposes particularly the 
individualistic orientation, emphasis on narrow aspects of broader social issues and lack of 
conceptual tools for exploring related problems, of mainstream psychology (Sinha, 1990). It has 
also been characterised by a growing debate on the possibility of indigenous psychologies, in the 
sense of theories of mind, psyche, personality, identity, etc. (see, for example, the papers in Kim 
& Berry, 1993). 

 Within this debate, a number of African psychologists argue that 'it is only when we start 
developing our own theories and epistemologies that we can really understand Africans and what 


makes meaning to the African people � indigenous psychology will enhance the understanding 
of local phenomena�' (Akotia & Olowu, 2000, p.7). From this particular Afrocentric 
perspective, there is increasingly an assertion of a distinctive African mind, which the 
Eurocentric practice of psychology in Africa (practised 'by Europeans themselves � or the 
whitewashed Africans who employ their European methods and thinking modalities' - Wober, 
quoted by Eze, 1991, p.28) has repressed or distorted in the past for racist or colonial purposes. 
This basic African personality type is understood to be based on a deep-seated, spiritual, psychic 
property shared by and unique to all Africans, namely 'the African thought processes and 
cosmological ideas which regard man not as a social means but as an end, an entity in society' 
(Mboya, quoted by Okpara, 1989, p.168). A number of contemporary African psychologists have 
sought to affirm this view of a basic African personality type in their theories. For example, the 
Nigerian psychologist Olowu claims that African self-identity is a collective phenomenon 
derived from the extended identity of the group, its 'beingness' (Akotia & Olowu, 2000, p.7). In 
his earlier studies of self-concept amongst Nigerian youths (Olowu, 1984, 1986), he suggests that 
it is distinctive Yoruba socialisation patterns that account for their strong self-concepts relative to 
English youths and to those, in Nigeria, who are alienated from these roots by social class 
factors. The South African psychologist, Bodibe (1992, 1996) argues that there are distinctive 
manifest behaviour patterns amongst Africans that can only be understood as evolving from 
unique African epistemologies. He suggests that in traditional African thinking, self-knowledge 
is a matter of projecting oneself 'outwards' and establishing relationships with the sky, land and 
one's kinship group, rather that dwelling on the relationship that people have with their own 
thoughts and feelings. Accordingly, he believes that Western concepts of knowledge promote ill 
health amongst Africans in the very fact that they propagate dualist, non-African notions of 
mind-body, thinking-feeling, experience-behaviour and subjectivity-objectivity. And Nyasani, 
the Kenyan philosopher and theoretical psychologist, develops perhaps the most comprehensive 
of all the published accounts of a distinctive African personality: 

� the African mind � reveals itself through what may rightly be called a 
congenital trait of sociality or sociability. It further reveals itself as a 
virtuous natural endowment of patience and tolerance. And lastly, it 
manifests itself as a natural disposition of mutual sympathy and acceptance. 
These three areas then appear to serve as important landmarks in the general 
description of the phenomenology of the African mind. (Nyasani, 1997, 
p.57). 

Perhaps the most important point is that this view of the individual is not merely a matter of 
academic psychology, but functions as a deep folk psychology. Okpara (1989) points out that 
belief in this basic personality type permeates African history and society. It is manifested in all 
areas of life, in religion, commerce and cultural activity, it is 'found among even the least 
rhetorical of African nationalists and thus constitutes part of the mythology of our political life' 
(1989, p.168). 

 Importantly, the tendency to position African psychology in opposition to Euramerican 
psychology derives to a large extent from this strong concept of a singular African personality. 
So, for example, Eze (1991) considers it a substantive requirement, in order to create an overall 
African perspective in psychology, to put forward a 'thesis calling for a systematic identification 
and separation of the � black African "we" from the European, foreign "they" as the first step 


towards the development of an African psychology and nationalism' (Eze, 1991, p.29). And 
Goduka (2000) argues that it is the fact that all Africans bear within them a stock of innate, 
spiritually-centred wisdoms that necessitates nzagwalu ('answering back when one has suffered 
many years of insult') against ignorant and racist European/Western scholarship in philosophy 
and psychology (2000, p.11). 

 This view of a distinctive African mind or psyche, however, is by no means unanimous 
amongst all African psychologists and philosophers of psychology. There has been an equally 
sophisticated theoretical perspective evident in Africa, which is sceptical of these notions, and 
instead looks to the development of authentic universal theories to provide psychological 
interventions and solutions for Africa. It should be noted, though, that this stream of thought 
shares the view that mainstream psychology, dominated as it is by narrowly-conceived 
positivism, operationalism and Cartesian conceptions of mind, has failed to engage adequately 
the problems of Africa. Dasen, the Swiss cross-cultural psychologist, captures well the central 
concern of such perspectives: 

Indigenous psychologies, while relevant in each particular cultural context, 
will be just as parochial, and ethnocentric, as Western psychology is at the 
moment. The mere multiplication of independently developed streams of 
psychology is not the answer, because we need to study universal aspects of 
behaviour as well as culturally relative ones. People from around the world 
are not only different from each other in interesting ways, they are also 
similar, or the same, in important ways. (Dasen, 1993, pp.152-153) 

On this view, it is the insertion of Africa into universal psychological theories that will ensure 
that psychology engages the issues and problems of the continent. 

 Exponents of this position include Okpara (1989), Mashegoane (1998) and G�lerce (1996). 
Okpara, reflecting on Nigerian experience, concedes that there are particular, even unique, 
psychological characteristics which come to the fore in an African context. However, he argues, 
'such an argument does not suggest, a priori, that "personality" � has an African texture or a 
European texture�. Evolution has not created two different minds - one for Europeans, another 
for Africans. If the so-called "Western mind" is highly abstract, the "African mind" is equally 
abstract; if the "Western mind" connects its abstract ideas by general relationships, so does the 
"African mind"�' (Okpara, 1989, p.172). He is particularly critical of the notion that there is a 
primordial African personality type, pointing out that this notion derives from the false idea that 
pre-colonial Africa was, in general, a classless society. Amilcar Cabral, for example, 
demonstrated that pre-colonial Guinea did have an exploitative class structure (cited by Okpara, 
1989, p.168), which gives lie to any idea that there is an inherited, shared common experience of 
'African' cultural harmony that can give rise to a distinctive personality type. In South Africa, 
Mashegoane finds a common ethnocentrism across both mainstream Western psychology and 
relativist 'African' psychology. He acknowledges the emptiness of a psychological discipline 
'implanted through � by the American version of Anglo-Saxon culture', but regards it as 
'paradoxical when there are calls for indigenisation of what should have been a science whose 
precepts and tenets cut across national borders' (1998, p.64). He wants to find a way of inserting 
indigenous psychological experience into a universal personality theory, arguing from 'within the 
conceptual framework of Afrocentricity' that an emphasis on difference in Africa is a racist, 
colonialist or apartheid 'game plan' (1998, p.60): 


Whatever the limitations and biases of Western psychology, indigenization 
which does not adhere to the principle of the monogenetic evolution of the 
human species violates the law of the common heritage of mankind. The 
search for differences is a legacy that psychology must minimise since the 
idea was originally based on erroneous and ethnocentric premises � 
Indigenization does not have to invoke and adopt the ethnocentrism that it 
seeks to destroy. (Mashegoane, 1998, p.60) 

In much the same vein, G�lerce (1996, p.122) urges caution in developing reactive, 'truly 
African indigenous psychologies' if such an enterprise implies 'a reaction to Western 
psychologies � merely replacing the values of x, y and z in those 'universal equations' with new 
African values'. For her, we need first to deal with the complex epistemological issues associated 
with the integration of context into developmental psychology, which necessarily involves a 
transformation of global theory making. Of course, she insists, 'raising issues which are relevant 
to Africa, instead of testing a western hypothesis in an African setting, is a completely different 
matter, and is never banned by an 'appropriate' developmental psychology which genuinely 
recognizes the context' (1996, pp.122-123). 

 The most prominent exponent of this kind of position is Nsamenang (1990, 1992, 1995, 
2000). In his most significant work, Human Development in Cultural Context (1992), he seeks 
'to stir up interest and systematic exploration of distinctly indigenous patterns of development so 
that developmental research in Third World contexts may fertilise and expand the visions, 
methods, and knowledge of psychology beyond current (Western) moulds' (1992, p.4). His 
research formulates a 'West African ontogeny', a hierarchy of 'socio-ontogenetic life stages' 
derived from careful analysis of the everyday life activities of west and central African 
communities: SPIRITUAL SELFHOOD . PERIOD OF THE NEWBORN . SOCIAL PRIMING 
. SOCIAL APPRENTICING . SOCIAL ENTR�E 
. 
SOCIAL INDUCTION/INTERNMENT 
. 
ADULTHOOD . OLD AGE/DEATH 
. 
ANCESTRAL SELFHOOD (Nsamenang, 1992, p.148). 
However, Nsamenang's argument is consistently that research into indigenous developmental 
processes contributes to a richer, more powerful global psychology: 

The witting or unwitting exclusion of the behavioural patterns of the bulk of 
humanity from a purported science of human behaviour undoubtedly 
renders psychology an insular science - a science of exclusion. This implies 
that developmental psychology merely masquerades as a global science of 
behavioural development. (Nsamenang, 1992, p.7) 

For him, the study of traditional settings in Africa will not only enhance our understanding of 
local psychological phenomena, but it will also expand our vision of psychological functioning 
across diverse cultures. For example, it will help us, within a universal psychology, to 'question 
models derived primarily from studies of Western populations' (Nsamenang, 1995, p.737). 
Research in this mode will allow psychologists to resist the 'monocultural', Euramerican theories 
and research agendas that marginalise or ignore African and other Third World psychological 
concepts, and limit 'the evolution of universally applicable developmental norms' (1992, p.6). 
Thus, 'the way to proceed is to acknowledge the achievements of mainstream psychology, accept 
it as indigenous Western psychology, but hybrid it and nurture it into a science that truly captures 


human diversity' (2000, p.2). Nsamenang wants, equally, to resist the notion of an 'African 
psychology': 

� there is much fragmentation of the behavioural sciences with 
designations such as: African psychology, American psychology, Asian 
psychology, European psychology, Black psychology, native American 
psychology, and so on. That some psychological processes are more 
characteristic of some societies or populations than others is but obvious. 
The tendency to infer from designations such as the above that the norm in 
psychological functioning is fundamental disparity among peoples and 
geographic regions is quite strong. What is true, however, is that the basic 
components of human personality - psychomotor, cognition, conation - can 
be identified in human beings everywhere. (Nsamenang, 1990, p.3) 

As I have put it elsewhere, Nsamenang's work, while considerably strengthening psychology in 
Africa, is 'not based on a notion of the narrow epistemologies and theories of a specific continent 
or geographical region, but rather on a continual theoretical movement of global, universal 
explanatory principles out of and into Africa' (Moll, 2002, p.14). 

African, European or Universal Psychology? 

This debate about psychology in Africa is a version of a deeper debate that takes place amongst 
African intellectuals in general, concerning the extent to which it is possible, in any domain of 
inquiry, to have distinctive African knowledge systems. The debate is well documented by 
Masolo (1994), and includes amongst its prominent participants Amin (1989), Hountondji 
(1983), Oruka (1981, 1987, 1990) and Wiredu (1980, 1998). Oruka (1987) characterises the 
dispute as one between the 'ethnographic school' of African philosophy on the one hand and the 
'professional school' on the other. I present his summaries of the core of each position below, 
alongside each other for ease of comparison: 

ETHNOGRAPHIC AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY PROFESSIONAL AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY 


argues, 'African societies are fundamentally argues, 'The west might have shown much 

distinct and different from the Western explicit advance in the fields of science and 
societies � The role of scientific models in the philosophy, � but neither science nor 
West is similar to, or taken by, the interaction philosophy is the preserve of Europeans and a 
of forces or, practically, by gods and spirits in mere imposed innovation on the Africans �. 
African culture.� Philosophy for the African African philosophy is still not seen as 
is a practical identification with the intuition represented by the texts and thoughts of her 
and unquestionable values and idioms of the scholars (modern, traditional, literate or 
cultural mass. . African philosophy is, hence, illiterate) but by the myths and magics of the 
the reverse of the thought that comes as the mass culture. Africa cannot � ignore her own 
outcome of theoretically and deductively past and traditions. But, she will equally be 
reached inference. [It] is an experience handicapped if she abandons science and logic, 
common and obvious to all members of the in the so-called Western sense, as things that 
stock.' (Oruka, 1987, p.58) are unafrican.' (Oruka, 1987, p.66) 


The classic texts of the former position are Tempels (1959) and Mbiti (1990). Tempels, a 
missionary in the Belgian colony of Congo, formulated the 'theory of the 'muntu' or bantu 
psychology' (1959, p.63 et passim) as a basis for understanding what he thought to be a unique 
African mind and hence, distinctive personal religious experience. Mbiti (1990), also working 
strongly within the perspective of missionology, sees the main task of African philosophy to be 
to account for the indigenous knowledge system or world outlook of Africa as a whole (his 
ultimate claim is that there is only one African traditional religion - hence one African 
philosophical system). Thus, argues Mbiti, philosophy must be sourced in the myths, folk-
wisdom and proverbs of the collective mass of the African people. One of the classics of the 
'professional school' is Hountondji's African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983). His argument 
is that, when African intellectuals reduce psychology, philosophy, social theory, etc. in and of 
Africa to folklore, they in fact place a significant obstacle in the way of the development of such 
knowledge. They constitute the main focus of inquiry in the human sciences as a relation 
between the 'knowledge of Africa' and the 'knowledge of the West', and so constrain and distort 
research and theoretical discourse in these disciplines. 

 The implication of Hountondji's insight is that the very move to establish an "African 
psychology' is self defeating, in that it is built on a truncated vision of Africa that is essentially 
Eurocentric. In engaging the debate further, I want to draw out this first level of paradox, and 
suggest that the pursuit of notions such as an African psyche, African mind or African 
personality actually undermines the development of an authentic psychology in the African 
context. 

 Okpara (1989, p.168) makes the ironic comment that 'the traits associated with the African 
personality are essentially a residual category of those qualities identified with the occidental 
man'. It is difficult to contradict this sense that 'African psychology' is constructed in the shadow 
of the dominant psychologies of Europe and America. The greatest irony is perhaps that the 
philosophical psychology associated with the 'ethnographic school' outlined above, with the 
pioneering work of Tempels and Mbiti, and with the strong versions of indigenous personality 
theory discussed earlier (Nyasani, Bodibe), owes most of its theories and methodologies to 
European anthropologists and missionaries who formulated the notion of 'collective philosophies 
of life' (Hountondji, 1983) on which it is based. Just as the ethnographers of the colonial powers 
and the apartheid state hermetically sealed the 'structure and function of primitive societies' (cf. 
Radcliffe-Brown, 1952) inside Africa, so the proponents of an indigenous African psychology 
and philosophy tend to seal off the cultural life of the continent: 

Cultural problems are � strangely simplified as culture is reduced to 
folklore, its most obvious superficial and flashy aspect. Its deeper life and 
internal contradictions, the fruitful tensions by which it is animated are all 
neglected, along with its history, development and revolutions. Culture is 
petrified in a synchronic picture, flat and strangely simple and univocal, and 
is then contrasted with other cultures which are also trimmed and 
schematised for the sake of the comparison. (Hountondji, 1983, p.160) 

Not least, Hountondji's argument is directed against the notion that there is a unique, distinctive 
collective psyche that simultaneously generates African minds and culture. He shows us that 
'African psychology' is a myth if it is conceived of as the product of theories and epistemologies, 


and correlated states of mind, that are unique to a singular people, nation or continent. The very 
notion of the insularity and distinctiveness of the African personality turns out to be constructed 
primarily in the terms of foreign conceptions of the continent and its people, rather than in 
relation to the authentic human and social developmental needs of Africa itself. The force of 
Hountondji's argument is that what psychologists in Africa need to do is to engage the problems 
and issues of Africa by means of all the powerful tools made available to them by psychology in 
general. Only then will they overcome 'the permanent temptation of "folklorism" that limits their 
research to so-called African subjects - a temptation which has owed most of its strength to the 
fact that their writings have been intended for a foreign public' (1983, p.67). 

 Samir Amin takes up this debate in his seminal study on Eurocentrism (Amin, 1989). 
Arguing, from the perspective of a radical intellectual in Africa, for the rebuilding of the human 
and social sciences along truly universalist lines, he demonstrates the weaknesses of both 
Europe-centred and Africa-centred theoretical perspectives, which he terms 'narrow 
provincialisms'. Eurocentric ideology tends to project Western images of humanity as the only 
possible resolution of contemporary problems; it imposes on Africa a notion of a supposedly 
dominant, 'eternal West'. However, argues Amin, an ideology like Afrocentrism is equally 
narrow, simply buttressing the dominant (Eurocentric) form of imperialism, in which 'all 
aspirations for universalism are rejected in favour of a 'right to difference' � invoked as a means 
of avoiding the real problem' (Amin, 1989, p.146). It is this insular, self-defeating attitude that 
Amin terms 'provincialism', and he abhors the fact that it is so much in fashion today. His 
particular contribution to the debate is to demonstrate that Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, as 
positions in the philosophy of knowledge, in fact entail each other, and, in that mutual 
entailment, expose each other's theoretical inadequacy. By analysing them, we are able to 
transcend both positions, and to start to develop Africa in a universal system of thought rather 
than in one that amounts to the residue of Eurocentrism. 

 So, the paradox of the search for a distinctive African psychology is revealed: it is the spectre 
of the mainstream, Euramerican psychological establishment that it ostensibly opposes. Its 
representations of Africa arise in the first place in non-African discourses of cultural difference. 
As Hountondji (1983, p.6) might put it, there 'is indeed a strange paradox' when the peculiarities 
of the African mind are depicted for Western consumption in the name of an authentic 
psychology of Africa. To overcome the paradox, just as Nsamenang and other leading African 
psychologists have done, requires the development of the universal theoretical potentials of 
global psychological theories in engagement with the realities of Africa. The promise, then, is 
that psychology in Africa will more effectively guide human affairs as it 'sheds its petty, 
overused monocultural coat and develops into a universal science' (Nsamenang, 1992, p.218). 

Local or Universal Explanatory Principles? 

To think about African psychology in this way positions it very much in the space of 
contemporary theoretical and methodological debate in the human and social sciences, as it takes 
place all over the world. The dispute is here set up as one between interpretivist psychologies of 
meaning in context on the one hand (which, inter alia, are deemed to bring African folk 
psychologies to the fore) and universalist psychology on the other (deemed to impose Western 
standards on African psychology). Conceived of in this way, the terms of the debate are much 
broader than either Africa or psychology. 


Edwards et al. (1995, p.43) summarise the debate in global terms, as disputation between 
relativists and realists. The former are variously described as '(social) constructionists and 
constructivists, deconstructionists, pragmatists, postmodernists, epistemological � relativists, 
subjectivists, sceptics, interpretivists, reflexivists and, especially, radical or thoroughgoing or 
extreme versions of the above. The family resemblance is a determined (or stubborn) anti-realism' 
(Edwards et al., 1995, p.43). One hold-all category that such thinkers often use to describe 
themselves is social constructionist (or, simply, constructionist, since what other kind of 
construction could there possibly be?). Certainly, the label does capture one the main commitments 
that gives these perspectives a common theoretical identity: they all construe our cultural artifacts, 
knowledge, practices, institutions, indeed (in their strongest versions) everything, as 'relative to' 
and 'constructed by' this-or-that culture-specific form of life, language game, paradigm, 
conceptual framework, interpretive community, or whatever. The latter 'family' - the realists espouse 
'a large range of academic realisms, from the na�ve to the sophisticated, and from the right 
to the left; from Eysenck to Bhaskar would sum it up'. Recognising that there are rather significant 
differences amongst realist positions (not least, that the na�ve realism of most experimental 
psychology is not the same thing as the anti-positivist, depth realism that seeks to build 
explanations in terms of generative mechanisms), we can accept this description to the extent 
that it captures a common commitment to discover universal explanatory principles. 
However, in order to understand the contemporary, global context within which our concern with 
'African psychology' might resolve itself, it is important to stress the distinction between na�ve 
realism and depth realism. Here, a historical perspective is called for. Toulmin (1990) provides 
us with an illuminating account of how and why a positivist view of knowledge, rooted in 
Descartes' quest for certainty and universal knowledge, came to dominate the self-image of 
occidental science and philosophy. Unquestionably, it drove extraordinary advances in many 
areas of human inquiry, but equally, Toulmin shows that an alternative scientific imagination, 
based on practical reasoning and a concern with the primacy of the local, the particular and the 
rhetorical, has always been evident in Western thought. It also contributed considerably to 
scientific traditions, despite having been suppressed in mainstream discourse on explanation and 
method. Toulmin's suggestion is that, for their 'complete resolution', all our social, biological and 
physical problems must be placed 'back into their larger human frame, with all its concrete 
features and complexities' (1990, p.201). His view captures well a contemporary, post-positivist 
consensus in social theory: 

Once the significance of 'traditions' and 'forms of life' is conceded � one 
must abandon Descartes' move in the Discourse on Method, in which he 
required us to ignore traditional ideas in favor of ones whose 'clarity and 
distinctness' to all reflective thinkers made them cultural universals. The 
questions, whether people in all cultures and epochs have access to the same 
neutral 'basic conceptual framework' equally; and if so to what extent and in 
what respects, is a question of fact that we can face with intellectual honesty 
only if we are ready to take anthropology and history seriously. (Toulmin, 
1990, p.189) 

The recognition that knowledge is situated is now unavoidable in the social sciences in general. 
This has brought to an end at least one aspect of the search for universal truths, namely that the 
knowledge produced by researchers can be decontextualised, unmarked by their position and 


character, and of universal applicability regardless of its own sociocultural contexts of discovery 
and justification. In this sense, na�ve realism is no longer a serious option. However, another, 
deeper debate concerning universality has now emerged, about the very possibility of any kind of 
theoretical or empirical claim having any kind of purchase outside the local context which 
generated it in the first place. 

 On the one hand, there are those who deny that there is any proposition that can refer to 
anything outside of our contextualised, conventional constructions of it. For example, Fish 
(1989) suggests that any claim to truth or correctness on any matter is simply a formulation of 
what we take, in terms of our beliefs, to be sufficient proof of the claim. So the idea of a 
universally applicable external referent is simply an acknowledgement that belief goes 'all the 
way down', and constructs our very idea of a real world: 

The one thing a historically conditioned consciousness cannot do [is to] 
scrutinise its own beliefs, conduct a rational examination of its own 
convictions; for in order to begin such a scrutiny, it would first have to 
escape the grounds of its own possibility, and it could only do that if it were 
not historically conditioned and were instead an acontextual or unsituated 
entity of the kind that is rendered unavailable by the first principle of the 
interpretivist or conventionalist view. (1989, p.245). 

If our culture goes all the way down, then the 'real world' (including the natural world) is 
unmistakably social construction which has become 'naturalised'. 

 On the other hand, there are those who argue that universal explanatory principles can be 
derived in certain cases from situated knowledge perspectives, but that this is a matter for case-
by-case research and argument to establish. The a priori notion that there can be no universal 
laws is itself an unsituated, and hence unjustifiable, perspective: 

� to note that a particular kind of knowledge comes form a particular 
culture or is associated with a particular subject position, does not entail that 
it is valid for or applies only to those who belong to the same originating 
social group. Acupuncture is Chinese in origin but it can also work on non-
Chinese people � French social theory cannot be discounted as only 
applicable within France! To be sure, there is no view from nowhere - all 
knowledge is social, situated and contextual. But it does not follow from 
this that truth claims can only be applicable to the particular groups who 
propose them�. the problem is not that knowledge bears the marks of its 
social origin -for we would hardly expect it not to - but where the marks it 
bears are problematic in relation to understanding the object in question. 
(Sayer, 2000, p.53) 

Furthermore, the tendency to relativise everything to local context brings with it a number of 
problematic denials of a shared, human reality. As Soper (1995) puts it, while universalist 
explanations are in danger of 'introducing an ethnocentric bias into their view of what is common 
to us all', there is the equal danger that we might neglect oppression and human suffering when 
we deny 'any shared structure of cognition, need and affectivity' in our theories (1995, p.65). 
What is being articulated here is the 'depth realist' claim that there are indeed some universal 


generative mechanisms which need to be taken into account in explaining human events, along 
with those that are locally specific. 

 Theoretically speaking, then, there is a more historically advanced (i.e. post-positivist) sense 
in which there remains an important global tension between interpretivism and universalism in 
social theory. 

Local African Psychology or Universal Psychology in Africa? 

These disputes have permeated psychology as much as any other social science. Any review of 
the full range of contemporary psychology journals will establish that the mainstream discipline 
is, as it has been for almost a century, dominated by a positivist aspiration to be numbered 
amongst the laboratory-based, or at least quasi-laboratory-based, 'natural sciences'. The 
associationist search for nomological, 'universal laws of behaviour' remains the dominant self-
image of psychology. However, it is also now entirely respectable to suggest from within 
psychology (in 'the West', as much as anywhere else) that this search is misguided. The countersuggestion 
is that, in principle, psychology is not about knowledge of discrete causes of 
behaviour established in closed, controlled circumstances, but about elucidating the meanings 
that people attach to their actions in authentic sociocultural contexts. This dispute, directed at 'the 
old associationism, which is still alive for many psychologists today' (Tryphon & Von�che, 1996, 
p.1), is now well established globally as a core, generative debate in psychology. There is 
widespread acceptance that the explanation of psychological phenomena requires theories and 
research strategies concerned primarily with how meanings and states of consciousness arise and 
are interpreted. A number of commentators have recognised a new, interpretivist paradigm in 
psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Parker, 1988; Smith et al., 1995), and numerous post-
positivist research traditions have emerged which no longer regard 'the laboratory' or 'the 
experiment' as the locus of proper psychological explanation. Theoretically, too, psychology has 
become more sophisticated and able to engage with and draw upon other disciplinary 
perspectives, although many of the new breed of interpretivist psychologists are still often 
'dumbfounded' that 'a field of academic specialism [experimental psychology] should exist so 
shot through with conceptual confusions, unexamined assumptions form antique philosophical 
positions long since demolished, and propounding theories of such gross implausibility�' 
(Harr�, 1990, p.342) 

 Most recently, this shifting of paradigms and problematics in psychology has opened up a 
new debate about psychological explanation. At issue is whether post-positivist psychology 
should best seek (i) to interpret psychological experience in the terms in which it is constructed 
and communicated in discourse, which is necessarily local, in which cultural context is 
everything (Potter & Wetherell, 1987), (ii) to model the underlying generative mechanisms 
(psychological, biological, social, etc.), at least some of which are universal, that give rise to our 
(meaning-full) states of mind and the behaviours thus motivated (Bhaskar, 1979), or (iii) do both. 
It is not my intention to engage this debate in depth here, but simply to make the point that, 
within it, the question of how much psychological models and/or narratives should be universal 
or locally situated is very much at stake. 

 Now, in the debates on what constitutes an authentic 'African psychology' that were examined 
above, the tension is between the local and the global, between culturally specific explanatory 
principles on the one hand and general psychological explanation across contexts on the other. 
Kottler (1990) refers to these tendencies as the 'differences' and 'similarities' discourses 
respectively, emphasising that each has purchase within the indigenisation concept in 


psychological theorising in Africa. The former discourse gives precedence to the particular, 
situated, sociocultural context of indigenous experience, albeit with some room to determine 
exactly how broadly the boundaries of the context should be defined (Africa as a whole or a 
particular San hunting band in the Kalahari desert?). The latter foregrounds a common 
phylogenetic and/or sociogenetic heritage as the basis of such psychological experience. 

 It is easy to see that those who argue for an indigenous African psychology actually position 
themselves within the terms of a broader debate. In the cases discussed earlier, Bodibe (1992), 
Goduka (2000) and Akotia & Olowu (2000) all equate Western psychology with the search for 
universal laws, measurement-based research methods and 'Newtonian-Cartesian epistemologies' 
(Goduka, p.2) of classical experimental psychology, and contrast it with the emphasis on local 
epistemologies, meaning-systems and wisdoms of a putative African psychology. Furthermore, 
once we recognise that this construal of non-African psychology is a straw person, then the fact 
of an international debate in Africa becomes even more apparent: 

Usually, criticism is leveled against the dominant modernist assumptions of 
mainstream psychology. This criticism is valid. However, what emerges 
from �the discourse around the irrelevance of psychology in Africa is often 
an impoverished image of western thought and the field of (western) 
psychology. Recent western thought also includes post-modernist 
perspectives, which may not be as alien to African thinking as modernist 
ones. Not all psychologists work form a 'positivist, empirical and materialist' 
approach any more. (Bakker, 1999, p.164) 

Bakker himself has still too limited a view of the terrain of the debate. If we take seriously 
Nsamenang's notion that specific research in Africa contributes to our understanding of universal 
mechanisms that construct human development regardless of context, then we need also to 
highlight the distortion of 'modernism' itself in the above quotation. It is not simply positivist 
pseudo-science, but extends into more sophisticated realist theories. Nsamenang's (1992, p.148). 
'socio-ontogenetic life stages', discussed above, is a case in point. His search is not simply for 
sociocultural mechanisms of psychological development in African contexts, but for what Soper 
(1995, pp.132-133) has referred to as the 'material structures and processes that are independent 
of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces 
and causal powers are the necessary condition of every human practice'. Nsamenang makes it 
clear that he seeks to explain psychological development ultimately by reference to the universal 
generative mechanisms (for him, psycho-ecological mechanisms) that can give rise equally to 
African, European, American, Asian and Oceanic experience. However, he is quite at home with 
the notion of situatedness, in that he discovers and builds a more comprehensive theoretical 
understanding of these universals by demonstrating the particular, situated form they take in 
particular contexts in Africa. 

 There is a tension between Afrocentric and universalist tendencies, each of which provides an 
interpretation of the situatedness of psychological knowledge in Africa. The former posits the 
existence of the unique, distinctive and, ultimately, exclusive African mind as the source of all 
behaviour and experience. The latter seeks to build and elaborate models of universal 
psychological processes and structures to account for and take account of the lives of people in 
Africa. Both tendencies reject the narrow stances associated with traditional, Euramerican 
psychology. However, paradoxically, the debate itself is not confined to parts of or the whole of 


Africa - it is a dispute that has raged fruitfully, in all local contexts, all over the world, between 
the different theoretical inheritors of critical, post-positivist psychology. 

Conclusion 

At first glance, the debate about the possibility of an African psychology is straightforwardly one 
in which the local knowledges of Africa confront the universal knowledge claims of Western 
psychology. However, if we take seriously the claim that the 'universal' of the mainstream 
Euramerican tradition 'is so peculiar and � so local' - see the Taiwo (1998) quotation at the 
outset of this article - then the matter is no longer quite so simple. There is something deeply 
paradoxical about projecting a core notion of Africanness - whether in its strong version, as an 
African essence, or in its weaker version, as a psychological object unique to the life 
circumstances of Africa - simply because it is at the same time the potential basis of a universal 
psychology that can challenge Eurocentrism. Furthermore, to posit such an insular African 
psychology defeats the development of an authentic psychology in Africa. To paraphrase Wiredu 
on the matter, to posit African psychology as the untouchable possession of Africans is to invite 
a touristic approach from its foreign audiences and to notice it merely as a cultural curiosity: 'if 
[it] may not be evaluated as false, then [it] may not be evaluated as true either' (Wiredu, 1998, 
p.9). The paradox that emerges here bites deeply those who espouse a 'truly African psychology'. 
In seeking to localise the production of knowledge in the way they do, they adopt a position that 
necessarily has recourse to an international debate and, within it, a set of universally applicable 
psychological propositions. In resolving the paradox, it becomes clear that any theoretical 
developments in African psychology are, willy nilly, a contribution to a body of universal 
psychological knowledge. 

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