Liberatory Africa(n)-Centred Community Psychology of Psychosocial Change

Formalised community psychology, and its critical variations in particular, has long been concerned with psychosocial change. Emerging from a developing method of collaborative thinking and writing, we consider in this chapter what a liberatory Africa(n)-centred community psychology might look and feel like, particularly in contexts of decoloniality, as well as what the consequences of such a praxis might be for psychosocial change. Accordingly, we take up the challenge of imagining how critical psychologists working in communities might situate and think Africa—with its myriad and often contradictory historiographies, politics, ideologies and cultures—within decolonising work, and how this situated thinking is able to re-write the disciplinary boundaries of community psychology. From here, in arguing for the transdisciplinary impulse of this kind of psychological praxis, we look to the revolutionary scholar and activist Neville Alexander whose work, despite having no formal ties with community psychology and is rarely—if ever—drawn on by community psychologists, serves as an important resource for those seeking to articulate a liberatory Africa(n)-centred community psychology. We conclude by considering what positioning the psychological within social change efforts means for decolonising psychologies of community within and beyond Africa.