"The world looks like this from here": Kopano Ratele's African psychology.

Abstract

This contribution engages the work of the contemporary South African Psychologist, Kopano Ratele, to illustrate the facets of sociopolitical and psychological dimensions of psychology from the Global South and its relevance for reimagining psychology across the continent and the global world. Ratele's African psychology framework offers us both a contemporary and critical analytic lens to reflect on the psychic life of power from the vantage point of Africa. This article explores two thematic contributions of Ratele's African psychology: (a) culture and tradition and (b) Black interiority. Ratele's African psychology presents a marked departure from much African psychology scholarship in its attention to the psychopolitics of Black life and Black death. Furthermore, by presenting African psychology as orientation, Ratele can engage both ontological and methodological dimensions of Black subjectivity as diverse, complex, and nonessentialist. In putting forward Ratele's scholarship as a key contribution to African and Black psychology, this article thus addresses the current epistemological impasse that seems to exist in psychology in Africa. This article concludes that Ratele's African psychology may provide us with a means of addressing this impasse toward making psychology in Africa relevant. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).