Identity and Ethnic Relations in Africa

Leonard Bloom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138321847
• eBook ISBN: 9780429839597
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Published in 1998, this text asserts that psychologists and sociologists have a professional and personal responsibility to further the "cure" of the damage done by governments. The author draws on his own personal experience of living and working in authoritarian, racist or ethnically-sensitive societies and argues that psychologists and sociologists can and should confront their professions and governments by playing an active, collective, therapeutic role in judging the psychological consequences of legal and political practice. The author is concerned with the critical, deconstructionist roles of psychoanalysis and looks at ethnic identity and culture, psychotherapy and mental health problems and the emotional costs and consequences of Apartheid.

1 Toward a Relevant Psychology

Against a Defeatist Psychology

Can there be a psychology relevant to the Third World? Should there be? There both should and can be such a psychology. We must create one. The alternative is that psychology professions will continue to stagnate, remaining conservative and satisfied with merely maintaining their scientific and political respectability. A revivified psychology could emerge from comparative research and the cross-fertilisation between Western techniques and methodology with the individual and collective problems of the Third World.

Kagitcibasi (1982) pleads for an independent, socially relevant and policy-oriented social psychology, staffed by Third World psychologists and working in interdisciplinary teams of social scientists. But his position conceals rarely examined problems. Are Third World psychologists more independent than others? Are they exceptionally sensitive to local problems? I am not as optimistic as Kagitcibasi that a new and more policy-oriented breed of psychologists is maturing. A major problem in establishing a relevant psychology is developing a professional identity and confidence that supports the professional in holding at bay suspicious and authoritarian administrators, who too often lack knowledge of the social sciences and who are too interested in immediate solutions to problems that they have themselves defined. Moreover, many Third World psychologists are as firmly locked into technologically biased, antihumanist and uncommitted philosophies of science as their Western colleagues.

I have another misgiving about Kagitcibasi’s optimism. Some psychologists have spent too much ingenuity in demonstrating the dangers of the exportation of the social sciences and on attacking the colonial mentality of Western psychology (Moghaddam and Taylor, 1986). It would be more useful if they began to create a critical and constructive psychology.

Yet as long ago as 1973, the Pan African Conference of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology (held in Ibadan, Nigeria) was almost entirely devoted to the problems and prospects in Africa for a young but relevant profession. It is, however, encouraging to read a paper published in a South African journal, Psychology in Society, which advances a theory and practice of a relevant psychology, and doubts that the ideological and institutional foundations of psychology are appropriate and directed to ‘do work relevant to the vast problems posed by our own needs as a Third World society’ (Dawes, 1988). Dawes describes how South African psychologists (and related workers) work among the poor and the persecuted - both children and adults. They use their professional skills to strengthen those whom we chillingly call ‘subjects’ to protect their integrity against the assaults of a violent society. Most South African psychologists are white. Most ‘subjects’ and ‘clients’ are black. One might cynically observe that even the most uncommitted white psychologist could gain professionally by working in a huge and largely ignored population. Dawes argues for a self-questioning psychology, collectively concerned pragmatically with transforming itself from a discipline largely constrained by the concepts, values, and problems of the urban industrialised one-third of the world, into one responsive to the massive problems of the nonurban, nonindustrialised two-thirds.

Abdi (1975) flatly asserts that ‘the concepts of psychology, its theories and methods as understood by Westerners are alien to the thinking of Africa’, and a fortiori to the thinking of other non-Western people. This is cryptoracism. Africans and other peoples of the Third World are no more aliens to Western people than they are to other people of the Third World. Many Westerners ‘think’ and ‘feel’ African. Many Third World people think and feel both Western and Non-Western! One of my African friends crisply observed to me: ‘I think like an African. I think like a Westerner. I think like Memoye!’ A relevant psychology will be remodelled from both Third World and Western thinking. It will happen only if psychologists reject the racism of those who claim that there are such gross divergencies between the affective and cognitive processes of different peoples that mutual understanding is, if not impossible, then, at best, difficult.

Other Third World scholars have argued that psychology is essentially so detached from the problems of the Third World that it is pointless to discuss ways in which it might be made more relevant. A detached and alien psychology must forever remain so. In a tendentious and bitter paper, Mehryar (1984) consigns his own profession to the rubbish bin. He writes that the problems of the Third World are, by their very nature and etiology, unlikely to be solved by psychology because the problems are economic, political and sociocultural. Not only are psychologists irrelevant to the Third World (Mehryar excepted, no doubt), but they are also agents of colonialism. Mehryar writes: ‘The social sciences in general, and psychology in particular, have in practice turned into another means of cultural dependence and colonialism’. Contradictorily, he rejects psychology in the Third World as insignificant in numbers and influence! He ignores the living influence of Frantz Fanon who seized Western psychiatric and psychoanalytic insights and transformed them into a potent social philosophy and psychology of resistance to colonialism. Fanon used a Western notion to create a Third World and liberating psychology.

Mehryar evades the real problems of a relevant psychology, which is not to exert social and political influence directly but, rather, indirectly to influence national ideologies and policy by demonstrating that political and social problems may be better solved by professional research and skills than by political passion. Psychology may, moreover, reduce the influence of colonial dependency by showing what can be done during the early years of childhood to encourage independence.

Ardila (1983) is as defeatist as Mehryar. Ardila, a Latin American psychologist, rejects Western psychology because it is, he claims, ‘an Anglo-Saxon discipline’ and ‘alien to the Latin American way of thinking’. He does admit that there is psychology in Latin America, ‘meaning the investigation and application of psychological principles in a particular context’. But all psychology refers to particular contexts. The important question is consistently to compare what we learn from one context against what we have learned in other, comparable, contexts. Ardila makes much of the complexity of Latin America, but fails to see that complexity is a challenge to the investigator. Latin America has twenty nations, three major languages, many ethnic groups, and peoples at many different levels of socioeconomic and political development - an excellent opportunity for cross-cultural research! An opportunity for a liberating psychology to evolve! The Third World, as indeed the rest of the world, offers similar and challenging opportunities for research at once relevant and possibly theoretically significant.

A non-Eurocentric psychology dates back to the early 1900s, yet these pioneering efforts have been almost totally ignored. The work from the 1920s onward of Bartlett, Nadel and Margaret Mead, for example, already indicated (on the basis of experimental or observational studies) that affective-emotional and cognitive-intellectual processes are essentially universal, although influenced by social and cultural variations. If the pioneers had been within the mainstream of the development of psychology, we might have had a relevant and culturally sensitive social psychology a generation earlier than it appeared in Otto Klineberg’s highly original Social Psychology in 1940.

I am, I believe, following an old trail that is now largely hidden by the flourishing of a narrowly conceived scientistic psychology. I argue for a contrasting approach - for a committed psychology that neither patronizes people nor surrenders to the cryptoracism of those who reify social and cultural differences into a somewhat outmoded quasi-biological determinism. I insist (perhaps a little too obsessively), that there is no place in a relevant psychology for either Abdi’s barely concealed racism, or for its Western counterpart that limits psychology to the known parameters of the Western, urban world.

Four Issues

Four issues will recur in my critique of nonrelevant psychologies, in my exposition of relevant psychological issues, and in my suggestions for a relevant psychology.

1. Should Western-trained psychologists extend their professional and political interests to Third World problems? Are there any gains for Western psychology from such extension, or would this be little more than adding an exotic but marginal element? I strongly believe that a relevant psychology is an essential and central part of all psychology, and that the comparison between mainstream Western psychology and Third World contributions may productively unsettle Western psychology.

2. Some psychologists have attempted to construct a relevant psychology, and, although I welcome their attempts as far as they go, I am sceptical about whether they add much to either our approach to Third World problems or to extending the aims and methods of mainstream psychology. Their essential deficiency is the result of their lack of involvement with their subjects in their subjects’ real world. This is not a radical notion: Kurt Lewin pleaded for such a relevant social psychology in the 1920s.

3. Western psychology is, I maintain, inadequate because of its overly behaviouristic and psychometric methodology. Many contemporary, Western-trained psychologists are timid about approaching such complex areas as motivation and socioemotional development. They also tend to reduce to psychometrical studies the complexities of the relationships between individuals and society. Whatever is difficult to shape in a statistical and testable form tends to be banished from mainstream psychology and to be regarded as unworthy of scientific psychology. So, out goes the psychodynamic perspective! But it is not essential to be a committed Freudian to adopt the psychodynamic perspective with its insights into the universal process of domesticating the antisocial (or asocial) human infant into the more-or-less socialised human adult.

4. I have been influenced by three complementary psychological perspectives: humanistic, psychoanalytic and social-gestalt. I adopt the positions that people are often motivated by goals and hopes, and that psychologists would do well never to ignore nor minimise individual strivings toward finding meaning to their lives. The psychoanalytic perspective contributes two related emphases. It is essential to understand the unconscious conflicts and anxieties that motivate much human behaviour. It is equally important to trace the emotional origins of behaviour and experience. A relevant psychology depends on these three perspectives, and is, thus, far away from most of mainstream psychology.

Sharing Psychologies

Internationally, psychology has been grossly wasted. The British Psychological Society has 22,605 members. It is most unlikely that there are even twenty thousand fully qualified and trained psychologists spread throughout the Third World, and the number and range of social and individual problems that might be better understood and alleviated by professional psychologists are immense and largely neglected. Yet, not one major association of psychologists has made an open social and political commitment to sharing collectively the skills and experience of its members with the handful of psychologists in the Third World. On the one side, the associations placidly wait for governments to ask for help. On the other side, Third World governments are reluctant to ask for help, partly because few governments have any idea that psychological research could help in understanding and solving social problems, and partly because most governments are politically sensitive to accusations that they might be depending on outsiders for help. But a major reason is that no professional association has declared boldly: ‘We have skills and experience. We have mutual problems. Can we get together, learn from each other and see what can be done to understand the problems and mitigate them?’

Owing to the passive indifference of the Western professional associations, the latent belief that Western psychology is the Westerner’s personal magic and Third World suspicions, psychology has been almost totally isolated from the problems of the majority of the world’s peoples.

This almost total apartheid within psychology is regrettable because of the universality of some psychosocial problems such as (1) alienation and the development of a sense of identity meaningful to individuals and not in conflict with their societies; (2) the control of aggression and of sexuality; (3) the most useful form of education for the development of cognitive skills and for the development of independence; and, most broadly, (4) the contribution of childrearing to the mitigation of tendencies toward learned helplessness, the readiness to attribute decisionmaking to individuals and groups over which the individuals feel that they have little or no control; and (5) the little recognised problem of encouraging cooperative and nonauthoritarian social and political relationships. None of the attempts to define a relevant psychology shows much awareness of the gravity of these problems, much less to investigate them with our sophisticated research techniques.

Possibly this neglect is a result of the attitude that the Third World has been little more than a theatre of operations, a convenient and interesting venue for research. Sharing psychology has meant no more than using Western research skills and experience to investigate specific empirical questions in which Western-trained psychologists have been interested. The resulting studies have usually been technically competent, but have rarely been applied to Third World problems. Western experimental design decorated by Third World palm trees remains Western-oriented psychology.

Connolly (1985) proposes that ‘if we are to grow a psychology for the Third World…such a programme would…lead to the development of “appropriate psychological technology”’. But is this enough? Psychology is more than skills and techniques. It must also generate insight into the human condition and stimulate sympathy for the pains of living, even though the pains may be caused by socioeconomic and political factors. The essential and almost totally neglected basis of a relevant psychology is the study of the obstacle-bestrewn journey ‘from metaphor to meaning’ (Stein and Apprey, 1987). We live within an atmosphere of metaphor that gives meaning to the goals and relationships of individual and collective life. A relevant psychology must, therefore, share more than its skills. It must even share more than the spirit of a scientific psychology. To share skills is not difficult. To communicate how it feels to think as a mainstream psychologist is more difficult but still not impossible. It is almost unheard of to explore the implications of extending psychology beyond mere ‘appropriate psychological technology’ to incorporate the enthusiasms of humanism’s approach to working with people rather than with subjects, for people are not subjects. A Third World psychology must become actively involved in the neglected question of the assessment and evaluation of the actual and potential psychological hurt or damage that policies may inflict. Western psychologists should lead the profession internationally to become the professional advocates for the more vulnerable members of society - the poor and the uprooted, those who are regarded as politically or socially dangerously deviant, the mentally disturbed, the ill-treated and ill-educated children.

So dramatic a shift in orientation will expose psychology to accusations that it is subversive or radical and, in both cases, politically tainted and, therefore, unscientific. But psychology is already implicitly political in being detached from the more urgent contemporary issues as well as in its hesitation and moderation when it does criticise social policies. But are not ‘subversive’ and ‘radical’ any more than synonyms for what is socially and politically disturbing? No psychology can be relevant to the Third, or any other, World unless it does unsettle those whose policies affect the happiness and welfare of the community.

From the psychoanalytic-cum-anthropological perspective, Stein (1985) suggests that there are theoretical reasons to share psychology. It is, maintains Stein:

…essential to understand what is now a mystery: how feelings come to be articulated in social institutions, symbols and rituals, and are enacted in social policy. The study of a society’s psychodynamic process and structure [is] a springboard for studying unconscious influences upon cultures.

Very little is known about how emotional influences and relationships in childhood shape adult relationships, although the broad principles are clear. Broadly the relationships and social sentiments that we acquire during childhood determine our adult relationships and social sentiments. We lack specific insights into what is probably the key variable - identity. One universal problem is learning how identity is formed in societies that are experiencing rapid change and, consequently, dual processes of disintegration and new forms of reintegration.

Moghaddam and Taylor (1986), in their critique of Western psychology observe that Third World psychology must consider the ‘dualism’ of Third World countries. They define dualism as ‘the presence of a modern and a traditional sector functioning alongside each other in the same society’. Ignoring for the moment the objection that these sectors interact rather than operate independently, identity formation is a particularly painful process in such riven societies, and therefore, a particularly central feature of a relevant psychology.

Questions of Methodology

The methods of psychology are as important as its content. Although psychology was introduced to the Third World from the Western and more urbanised-industrialised part of the world, this does not, in itself, justify the argument that psychology is irrelevant to the Third World.

The basic scientific methods of proposing testable questions and hypotheses, gathering data or evidence and evaluating its relevance, validity and reliability apply to all kinds of psychological questions and societies.

But this view is not without its critics, who appear to deny that the Third World should even consider how far these principles are applicable and worth sharing. Asante (1987) has a pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• The Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Toward a Relevant Psychology
• Chapter 2 Social Science in Africa: Problems and Prospects
• Chapter 3 Psychotherapy and Culture: A Critical View
• Chapter 4 Cultural Fragmentation and Mental Distress
• Chapter 5 Ethnic Identity: A Psychoanalytic Critique
• Chapter 6 The Emotional Damage of Apartheid: A Psychoanalytic View
• Chapter 7 Apartheid’s Children: The Emotional Costs
• Chapter 8 Quasi-family, Quasi-psychotherapy: Six Years of Living Together, Black and White, in South Africa
• Chapter 9 After the War is Over: Truth and Reconciliation? Reflections from South Africa