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African Psychology, Critical Trends

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Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology

Introduction

For the past 50 or 60 years, the professional study of psychology in Africa has been dominated by the Euro-American approaches. Thus, modern scientific psychology, drawing exclusively upon the empirical, positivistic, mechanistic, and materialistic traditions of the West, gained absolute ascendancy in African academies as part of the general impact of our colonial contact with the West. For this reason, the study of psychology in African universities became the exclusive province of mainstream Western psychology. This situation severely overshadowed and encumbered any early attempts to introduce African perspectives to psychology in African universities.

Fortunately, through the inspirational writings of some Africanist writers and scholars like Frantz Fanon, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Achille Mbembe, Paul Gilroy, Valentine Mudimbe, Toni Morrison, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, this unfair situation was not allowed to go unchallenged...

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Correspondence to Augustine Nwoye .

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Nwoye, A. (2014). African Psychology, Critical Trends. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_483

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_483

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

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