Psychology In Africa Psychology Revivals

It is now well over a hundred and fifty years since the first celebrated geographical explorations of Africa took place. However, it was many years before there began quests of a different kind – the investigation of behaviour, personality, attitude and ability among Africa’s people. Originally published in 1975, this book is an account of that work: the first explorations in Africa of psychology. In an exhaustive and well-documented report the author, a psychologist who had himself done research in Nigeria, Uganda and who had lectured at Makerere University, drew together the main threads of the research carried out so far, putting the issues in an African perspective but anchoring them firmly within the framework of modern psychological thinking and technique of the time. Are there any common personality and intellectual characteristics among Africans? How does weaning affect African child development? How have Africans’ feelings developed about city life and industrial work? The questions the author considers range from the broad-based to the specific. The challenges which lay ahead for African investigators then moving into the mainstream of the work are also discussed. But perhaps above all the book made a convincing case for psychology becoming a relevant and finely honed discipline in Black Africa, characterised by practical application to Black African society. Each chapter covers a defined area of modern psychology of the time and presents a comprehensive survey in a language no more technical that the subject warrants. At the time is was felt this book would be invaluable to students of Africa secondary education whose course included a psychology component and to African students beginning a degree course in psychology. It would also have provided an informative supplement to courses in medicine, development studies, political science, sociology and anthropology.

First published in 1974, then reissued in 1986 with a long introduction by the author, which developed the analysis in the light of recent theory and related it to work done in the field since its first publication. The late Peter Marris shows how understanding grief can help us to understand processes of change, both personal and social, and to handle them with more compassion for ourselves and others. He sees grieving as the working out of a psychological reintegration, whose principles are essentially similar whether the ‘structures of meaning’ of our life fall apart from the loss of a personal relationship, of a predictable social context or of an interpretable world. Marris draws on his wide-ranging research to develop his argument. A study of widows, a description of the devastating effects of urban renewal projects on people whose familiar neighbourhoods are destroyed, an analysis of the activities of tribal associations in Nigeria, and reflections on the analogies between scientific and political revolutions are a few of the studies Marris weaves together in tracing the meaning of change and loss in human life.

This comparative study of African religion and psychology deals with the idea of the soul and the spiritual powers of man and animals in West African belief. Based on personal research supported by anthropological study, it covers most of the coast and hinterland from the Ivory Coast to Eastern Nigeria. It records beliefs in a future life; reincarnation; metamorphosis; ghosts; hysterical possession; soul-eating by witches; and the interpretation of dreams.

Professionals, whether engaged primarily in theory, research, or practice, will welcome the freshness and depth of vision this anthology affords into the history and teaching of psychology, into the methodology of culture-specific research, into the peculiar predicament of the African American, into the effects of oppression and the very nature of human personality. Students of psychology, at every level, will find in this book valuable and proactive alternatives to the prevailing Eurocentric analyses.

As psychiatry has developed it has proved to be susceptible to the influence of contemporary social and political mores. With its origins in nineteenth-century Europe, psychiatry evolved as an ethnocentric body of knowledge, the vehicle of implicit and overt racism. Originally published in 1988 this author, however, saw no reason why the contemporary psychiatrist should not challenge this ethnocentrism. He provides a critical account of the development of psychiatry in relation to its cultural context and then examined contemporary practice of the time in the light of this development. Throughout, the book is informed by an awareness of issues of race and culture and of their difficult interactions, the author emphasising both the frequency of racist attitudes and the very real cultural distinctions in our society, distinctions that can be used to mask what are actually racist sentiments. What emerges is not just a plea for an anti-racist, culture sensitive psychiatry, but a blueprint for how this can be brought about. He argued that the shift towards community work and social psychiatry could reorientate the profession by confronting it with its social setting and responsibilities. This book represented a significant contribution to this literature for all mental health professionals and social scientists with an interest in this field at the time; the author has gone on to write many more.