Africa’s Knowledge Archives, Black Consciousness and Reimagining Community Psychology

In this chapter, we argue that the quest for decolonised community psychologies must necessarily engage with multiple knowledge archives. We draw on select historiographic accounts of Africa to invoke Africa’s archives and their attendant paradigmatic traditions. Our engagements with these archives signify at once onto-epistemic rupture as a counterpoint to the Eurocentric assumptions that continue to frame community psychology theory and practice in Africa and other parts of the Global South, and epistemic praxis as a decolonising response, inspired by the subalternised knowledges of Africa. We extend our analysis to theorise Black Consciousness philosophy as an insurrectionist archive that may be mobilised for liberatory articulations of community psychology in Africa. We accord primacy to the exposition of collectivist and humanising ontology—anchored in psycho-political praxis and activism—as a foremost contribution by the Black Consciousness Movement to the making of liberatory enactments of community psychology.