In the United States, one front of the battle for greater equality is the removal of Confederate flags, statues of Southern Civil War generals and other relics of a hate-filled past—efforts that have sparked protests and counterprotests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and beyond. But the United States isn't the only nation reckoning with a painful past.
In South Africa, a protest centered on a statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes on the University of Cape Town campus in 2015 helped launch a #RhodesMustFall movement that hopes to "decolonize" the country's higher education. In 2016, a #FeesMustFall movement calling for free higher education ushered in another wave of student protest.
Although the statue of Rhodes is now gone, decolonization remains a prime topic of discussion and debate across disciplines. In psychology departments across South Africa, students and faculty are tackling the question of how to overcome psychology's past moral failings. Their goal? To ensure that the discipline is useful in a multicultural society still struggling with inequality, poverty, violence and other ills more than two decades after the end of the apartheid era, the period between 1948 and 1991 in which racial segregation and discrimination were official government policy. While the meaning of the term decolonization is still contested, a central focus is to dismantle vestiges of white supremacism.
"Psychology has a very dark history in South Africa," says Suntosh R. Pillay, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and clinical psychologist at King Dinuzulu Hospital Complex in Durban. "Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief architect of apartheid, was a psychologist himself."
Now psychologists are working to develop a more relevant and contextualized psychology that can meet the needs of the majority of South Africa's population. These psychologists are changing the way they do psychological assessment, which was used to maintain white supremacy during the apartheid years and almost outlawed in employment contexts after the transition to democracy. They are examining how best to "Africanize" both the psychology curriculum and conceptions of mental illness and treatment. They're also using research methods that make science more relevant to the majority of South Africans.
For South African psychologist Saths Cooper, PhD, president of the International Union of Psychological Science, removing the "stain of colonialism" and locating psychology within lived experiences are crucial next steps in the discipline's development.
"The quest for a psychology that is reflective of and accessible to all of humanity should be a truly worthy endeavor that will strengthen our science and its numerous applications globally," says Cooper. "The desire for psychology to be more reflexive, eschewing its traditional preoccupation with a limited Euro-American worldview, deserves all of our considered attention."
Overcoming a troubled history
Psychological assessment is an especially ripe area for decolonization, says Sumaya Laher, PhD, president of the Psychological Society of South Africa and an associate professor of psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
"Of all the areas in psychology, assessment probably has the most nefarious history," says Laher. "Even prior to apartheid, it was used to justify oppression."
The government used assessment tools designed for well-educated, English-speaking white populations to demonstrate black South Africans' intellectual inferiority and aptitude for manual labor, says Laher. Following the country's first democratic elections in 1994, the government initially proposed outlawing employment-related psychometric testing outright and subsequently required testing of employees to be valid, reliable and unbiased. But, says Laher, even well-validated tests still don't work for the majority of the country for whom English is a second language and whose education is minimal. There's also the issue of translation, given the nation's 11 official languages.
Now, Laher and Witwatersrand psychology professor Kate Cockcroft, PhD, explain in a recent paper, South African psychologists are trying new, more culturally sensitive approaches as a way of decolonizing assessment (Professional Psychology: Research and Practiceopens in new window, Vol. 48, No. 2, 2017). One strategy is to use more qualitative methods to supplement quantitative data, says Laher, with the focus shifting from test scores to narrative meaning-making. These techniques—which are appropriate for low-resource settings—include inviting clients to create a story in a tray of sand or asking clients to create self-portraits within the outline of their bodies chalked on a playground or drawn on paper.
Training of psychology students also needs decolonization, says Wahbie Long, PhD, a senior lecturer in psychology and a clinical psychologist at the University of Cape Town. What students and some academics have taken issue with is the Eurocentric nature of academic knowledge, says Long. "Psychological research is frequently autobiographical; psychological researchers tend to do the kinds of research that resonate with them on a personal level," he says. "So, if we want African psychology to avoid the racially and culturally essentialist cul-de-sacs of the last two or three decades, we need to do things differently."
But there's debate about how to do things differently. For some, decolonizing the curriculum means "Africanizing" it, foregrounding African epistemologies as a corrective against Eurocentrism's overemphasis on the individual and other problems. But such efforts have foundered, argues Long in a recent editorial (South African Journal of Psychologyopens in new window, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2016). "Africanization is frequently articulated in ways that are racially and culturally exclusionary, resonating with apartheid-era discourses of differences," he says. Africanization can also entrench essentialist ideas about Africans, says Long, arguing that it can fall into the trap of homogenizing diverse African thought into the paternalistic notion of an African worldview.
What's needed instead, Long says, is training that acknowledges the appalling conditions in which too many South Africans live. "Questions of class, inequality, poverty and so on very seldom make it into the consulting room," he says. "In psychology—not just South African psychology—we tend to ignore questions of social context, economics and structural violence and how they play out in people's psychological lives, and end up with interventions that are ill-suited for the problems people actually have in their lives."
As his own effort to decolonize the curriculum, Long has introduced a seminar on critical psychology to expand future clinicians' scope of reference. "Clinicians who are more attuned to the social determinants of psychological suffering can only make for better clinicians," he says. "It's not necessarily about getting clinicians to do things differently in the consulting room but to think differently about human suffering."
The language of training and practice is another problem, says psychologist Puleng Segalo, PhD, an associate professor and head of research and graduate studies in the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Higher education instruction is typically in English, yet many students have English as their third or even fourth language, she points out. Other students and clinicians don't speak the indigenous languages of the clients they're trying to serve.
Even basic conceptions of mental illness and how to treat it need to change, says Segalo. Take the supposedly neutral diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Because of its individualistic focus, she argues, traditional psychology pathologizes those suffering from trauma, situating the problem within the individual rather than considering how trauma is also manifested in a family and community and how broader political, social, economic and historical forces contribute to suffering (Social and Personality Psychology Compassopens in new window, Vol. 9, No. 9, 2015).
That doesn't mean that South African practitioners need to toss out Western psychology altogether, says Segalo. "The idea of decolonizing is that there is space for diversity, space for multiple ways of knowing."
That could mean being open to doing therapy in new ways, for example. For many of the most vulnerable South Africans, she points out, the unfamiliar act of sitting in a room alone with a psychologist they don't know just doesn't work. More effective options might include traditional healing circles, dances, drumming and just engaging with others and with nature, she says. "Traditional healers also have knowledge about how to deal with people who have experienced trauma," she says.
Other South African psychologists are trying to decolonize research methods. For Shose Kessi, PhD, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Cape Town, that has meant using a participatory action research tool called PhotoVoice to overcome what she calls the "epistemological violence" of traditional research methods. With PhotoVoice, a qualitative method developed in the 1990s, researchers give cameras to community members to document their lives, identify common challenges and collaborate on solutions. The goals are to build consciousness and make participants agents of change in their own communities.
"It's a decolonial approach because it challenges traditional ways of doing research where the researcher is looking for information that exists out there," says Kessi. "Here we're saying, ‘No, the knowledge is produced through the interaction in the community.'"
Kessi has been using the approach with students and staff at her university, with much of the discussion focused on race. "Most of the students talk about coming to the University of Cape Town as the first time they felt black as they were being confronted by the whiteness of the institution," she says, noting that students often report that white peers undermine their work and won't even sit with them. For staff, the focus has been on denial of promotions and access to resources.
Kessi now heads a "transformation" committee for the humanities division. While the transformation committees in each faculty weren't set up to address decolonization, says Kessi, "issues of decolonization are necessarily part of the discussions we are having."
No matter what area of psychology, adds Pillay, discussions about decolonization are a crucial first step in ensuring the discipline's viability. As he argues in a recent editorial (South African Journal of Psychologyopens in new window, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2016), "Silence is violence."
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