(African) community psychology

Abstract

Or let us take community psychology. We can begin with a quick look at two textbooks on community psychology published in South Africa. They offer eye-opening lessons on this matter. The first book, Community Psychology in South Africa (second edition, published in 2012), is edited by Maretha Visser and Anne-Gloria Moleko. The second book, published in 2001, is Community Psychology: Theory, Method, and Practice . The editor is Mohamed Seedat, with Norman Duncan and Sandy Lazarus as consulting editors. The textbook edited by Visser and Moleko has nineteen chapters covering topics such as mental health, HIV/Aids, different theoretical approaches, social support, crime and violence, substance abuse, poverty and inequality, race and intergroup relations. An intriguing aspect of this book, which declares itself to be embedded in South Africa , is that one of the chapters, written by Boshadi Semenya and Makgathi Mokwena (2012), seems to be aimed at presenting a more African take on community psychology. This is confused and confusing thinking. Imagine that the book was called Community Psychology in South Africa . South Africa is a country in Africa. To have a chapter on Africa in a book on Africa is muddled thinking. But it is also forced on many of us by the entanglement and contradictions caused by settler colonialism and apartheid that provoked a sense of South Africa as not African, or not-quite African. It may also be that the chapter falls into the trap of thinking of Africans primarily or only as defined by the religiously ‘cosmological’, of Africans as essentially mythological and spiritual in their reasoning. The chapter in question has the title ‘African cosmology, psychology and community’. What is eye-opening is that in this book written by South African authors and published in South Africa, the chapter by Semenya and Mokwena seems to be the only one expressly intended to give an ‘African’ perspective. In contradistinction to this, the rest of the book expresses an uncertain view as to whether it is African or not, or, more precisely, what kind of African it is. I contend that the mere fact of this book being edited and written by authors from Africa and published in an African country makes it a book on (African) community psychology. But of course it does not make it African-centred.