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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: D23-04. To panel D23.

Title of paper:

Author:

Kikooma Julius (Makerere University).

Long abstract paper:
Academic psychology arrived in Africa along with other imports that accompanied European colonization. Given the circumstances that accompanied its importation, psychology as it is taught, researched and practiced is at odds with the human agency observed in the everyday experiences of people on whom it is practiced in Uganda.

The teaching of psychology is largely done using resources that present lived experiences and issues that are framed within particular[western] historical, socio-cultural and economic contexts. The result is a situation where, in Uganda, students do not see themselves in the curriculum nor do they see themselves as potential future sources of knowledge of their own human experience and condition. In this framework, psychology is seen as contributing to epistemic injustice and epistemological violence and with or without mischievous intentions it's practitioners have perpetuated a number of wrongs in the understanding of human experiences in Africa.

To correct this narrow perspective academic departments in Africa (Makerere University inclusive) have tried to reform their curricula in order to project and mainstream multiple perspectives about human experience that include Africa. Central to this is the idea of building a new generation of young scholars from African Universities engaged with knowledge from Africa. Yet a new knowledge for Africa cannot come from merely reproducing a Euro-American epistemology of the last three hundred years.However, there are no available reference textbooks that meet the above needs. But how can we begin to take intellectual traditions from our spaces seriously and not continue with the dichotomy of African fact and European theory?

In this paper we discuss ideas in an ongoing book project on the above topic that arose from PhD student workshops during which the students took these provocations and turned them into new avenues for rethinking new possibilities of theorizing psychological agency. From the workshops, the students developed ideas and theories from their research into draft book chapters. The book is currently under review by the publishers. Among other objectives, the book aims to fill this paucity of reference material that centre the lived experience of the African subject in research and raising the consciousness of psychologists who teach students about the centrality of sociocultural perspectives on the self and mind which envision psychological processes that have a cultural-historical aspect and that moves the consideration of sociocultural beyond the immediate interpersonal and social situation.