what  is african psychology?

African Psychology is the study and understanding of human behaviour, wellbeing, healing, relationships, and human development through African worldviews, values, knowledge systems, and lived experiences.

It looks at life from the perspectives of people of African ancestry, including the experiences of communities affected by oppression, enslavement, colonisation, and displacement, rather than primarily from the perspectives of colonisers or invaders.

Rather than viewing people as isolated individuals, African Psychology recognises the importance of identity, culture, spirituality, ancestry, community, purpose, and collective wellbeing.

African Psychology is both decolonising and re indigenising. It seeks to restore and apply the best of African thought, healing practices, ethics, and wisdom traditions in contemporary and accessible ways for modern life.

Although African Psychology particularly centres the experiences of people of African ancestry, its principles can offer insight and benefit to all people, in the same way that Stoic philosophy, mindfulness, yoga, and Eastern philosophies are now applied more broadly across cultures.

The discipline has a long history and a short formal past. As a modern discipline, African Psychology formally emerged in 1968 when a group of Black psychologists in the USA walked out of the American Psychological Association (APA) conference in protest against deficit based models and theories being indiscriminately applied to people of African ancestry.

These psychologists later recognised that simply reproducing Eurocentric or Western psychology with Black faces was not enough. They began exploring healing methods already used within African descended communities, travelled to parts of Africa, studied traditional knowledge systems and sacred texts from North, West, East, and Central Africa, and developed what became known as Black Psychology, later evolving into African Psychology, identifying with a continent of origin rather than simply a colour.

Today, African Psychology continues to grow as a framework for healing, understanding, empowerment, and human flourishing.

Dr Erica McInnis, Founder and Managing Director of NWAH CIC, was fortunate to study under some of the founding mothers and fathers of the modern African Psychology movement during her Churchill Fellowship in the USA in 2016. In the Ma’at spirit of reciprocity, she learnt from others and now shares this knowledge with others.

It explores questions such as: Who are we? How do we heal? What helps people flourish? through perspectives that have developed across African societies over generations.

African psychology understands wellbeing as more than the absence of distress. It values connection to self, community, purpose, environment, and cultural identity as important foundations for living well.