How decolonisation can heal our mental pain
• Treatment can work better if it is local and not from other places and times
Hope and healing might feel unattainable for many South Africans in 2023. Between intergenerational trauma and political betrayals, more people are reaching for antidepressants or lapsing into resignation.
At its 34th annual conference at Emperors Palace in Johannesburg at the beginning of October, the Psychological Society of SA (PsySSA) offered decolonisation as a solution to our national distress, but is this viable?
Prof Floretta Boonzaier opened the conference as the society’s outgoing president, pointing to the wounds created in the psyche of the global south by colonisation alongside its rich history of resistance and emancipation.
The society is the largest independent psychology body in SA. It is not affiliated to the government, but made up of a group of SA psychology experts and amateurs, academics and activists — essentially, psychology nerds.
Boonzaaier’s opening speech pointed to the necessity of decolonisation and indigenisation for hope and healing. Her opening remarks acknowledged the trauma of the past while looking to the possibilities for an SA psychology that is genuinely aligned with the needs of our present reality, that is, mental health interventions that respond to the actual experiences of South Africans as opposed to interventions along the lines of those created by people living in different times and places.
An argument for the decolonisation of psychology includes asking which pivotal psychological concepts belong to which people. Are concepts created in the West relevant to everyone? And what effects come from importing Western concepts rather than using local knowledge?
A psychological consequence of colonisation is shame. Colonisation stifled to extinction, in some cases, and to the verge of it in others, the natural development of indigenous populations. The message of colonisation is “we know better than you, we will force you to do it our way”. Implicit in the justifications of colonisers is the idea that indigenous ways of doing things are wrong, stupid, immoral and “uncivilised”.
Think of the classic racist notion that “there was nothing in Africa before the whites came”. As if a whole continent was staring into space before being invaded.
Hundreds of years of this message being dominant in social institutions have eaten into the woodwork of the psychologies of colonised populations. To illustrate, take the example of the upset that was caused by Clicks and TRESemmé shampoo marketing belly flop in 2020.
Clicks posted an advert on its website with four photos of women’s hair — two of black hair and two of white hair. The photos of black women were labelled as “dry and damaged” and “frizzy and dull”, while the white women’s photos were labelled as “fine and flat” and “normal”. The crux of the problem was that the black women’s hair featured in the ad was healthy and there was also nothing wrong with the photographs of the black hair. The calamity lay in the framing — that sleek blonde hair is normal, while black hair is not.
Think about your own hair for a minute. Our hair is often a medium of our self-expression: some people refuse to get a hair cut as an act of rebellion, others have a trim every two weeks as part of their professional image. For yet others, dying, braiding and accessorising is a way to claim their individual identity.
PROPONENTS OF DECOLONISATION ARGUE KNOWLEDGE RESOURCES ARE TO BE FOUND IN THE UNSTIFLING OF COLONISED PEOPLE
For an advert to categorise normal black hair as dry, frizzy and dull was not only shortsighted from a marketing perspective, but also shaming. It labelled the completely normal for many people as wrong, bad and needing to be fixed. It pressurised black women to see their hair as presentable in public only after they have spent money and time, and resorted to harmful chemicals.
Former Miss Universe Zozibini Tunzi tweeted at the time: “No ways.” Clicks and TRESemmé issued unequivocal apologies soon after being overwhelmed by EFF protests.
But this was just how colonisation affected hair. People alive today have lost family members to racist attacks, have suffered discrimination as children trying to learn, have experienced the urge to end their lives due to alienation and isolation, lack of hope and of power. It may be reductionist to see colonisation as the sole causal factor, but it is certainly a big player.
Decolonisation as a theme showed up in many forms throughout the conference. Gender-affirming care, climate psychology and studies investigating the experiences of intravenous drug users were among the presentations. Over-age pupils were considered, female traders at the Tshakhuma Fruit Market got attention. Robert Sobukwe, Lilian Ngoyi, Abertina Sisulu and even Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett were called on to inspire current problem-solving efforts.
Another topic on the programme was indigenisation. Where decolonisation is to unstifle, indigenisation is to stimulate. Traditional African spiritual and cultural viewpoints are being investigated with the same respect as the viewpoints traditionally taught in mainstream training institutions.
For example, Wits University has a reputation for prioritising psychological theory from what is referred to as the psychodynamic perspective, rooted in the classical concepts of European theorists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The psychodynamic school puts the interplay between conscious and unconscious motivations at its centre. This is a very open way of conceptualising human psychology, leaving room for diverse interpretations, but is essentially an individualistic way of thinking about human functioning. It puts the self at the centre of our therapeutic efforts.
This works for many people, but for those who identify with a collectivist culture, it will always fall short. Indigenisation seeks to open spaces for the inclusion of more local ways of thinking about the wellness of the mind and spirit.
From this perspective, concepts created in the same place as the people they aim to treat are more relevant. Psychology that comes out of the geography, the history, the culture, the life priorities of local communities must understand them better than a far-removed psychology. Proponents of decolonisation argue that there are knowledge resources to be found in the unstifling of colonised people. With this strategy of giving attention to local knowledge systems, we can ask whether traditional healing has as much merit, if not more, than imported European psychology. Or perhaps, they can inform each other.
Traditional healing is an umbrella term for diverse local healing knowledge systems, which might include herbal, spiritual and psychosocial interventions. Many psychologists at the conference, including PsySSA presidentelect Prof Tshilidzi Mercy Mulaudzi, donned cultural garments and presented on their practice of traditional healing. They emphasised how many South Africans seek traditional healing as the most relevant and relatable medicine for them.
Estimates indicate that 60% of the SA population consult traditional healers either exclusively or in conjunction with biomedical practitioners. There may be as many as 200,000 traditional healers practising compared with 25,000 medical doctors registered with the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA).
The widely held view of traditional healers does not help to move towards healthcare systems that meet the needs of every citizen. Dr Sipho Dlamini, on the panel discussion topic of therapies for healing justice, expressed the anxiety with which he attended the conference, because his instinctive, intuitive way of healing is not formally recognised by the council. Many genuine healers are not allowed to register their practice as there are no categories for them.
Other plenary speakers included Anele Siswana, a registered clinical psychologist whose practice has gained admiration because of its holistic African-centred approach to mental wellness, including traditional ways of understanding and healing the spirit.
Dr Mmatshilo Motsei is an author, speaker and traditional healer, who started her career in nursing. She went from stitching up the physical wounds caused by domestic violence to developing the Agisanang Domestic Abuse Prevention and Training Programme (Adapt). She pointed at a representation of her trauma on the ceiling of the hall — walking into the conference, ostensibly on the topic of healing, and looking up into the face of Mars, the Roman god of war, and Venus, the Roman goddess of love and sex. As academics pointed out further ironies, pleasure seekers enjoyed the slots, the spas and the Roman-styled interior decoration of Emperors Palace, The Palace of Dreams.
Questions on decolonisation and indigenisation at the conference were being asked in the interest of SA psychologists tackling a mental health epidemic. Decolonisation might appear to be an unnecessary problem that wastes time on efforts to precisely define mechanisms of damage when our energy should be directed at how to walk forwards.
This would be the more stoic form of coping with our mental healthcare task. The coping strategy of stoic forward motion works for many people, though these might be the only people for whom current institutions were designed, and they might be in the minority.
For many others this kind of stoic attitude may be impossible, a case of, “let’s walk forward” versus “I can’t walk”. The current available statistics put the number of people in SA in mental distress at somewhere between one in four, one in three, or even as high as 50% in more vulnerable communities such as the LGBTQ+ and neurodivergence spectra, as well as in rural areas.
It is a big portion of our society. The large figures seem more realistic when we stop thinking of mental illness as a failure of fortitude and consider it a normal and logical response to trauma, stress or marginalisation.
At the same time, only about 5% of the national healthcare budget is apportioned to mental healthcare. Bodies such as the Psychological Society of SA are trying to address the problem. With so much talk about decolonisation, it’s clear that a significant portion of the thinking happening at this conference was about the past. Whether this investment will pay off remains to be seen.
AI HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE USED WHERE HUMAN PSYCHOLOGISTS MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO GO, INCLUDING WAR ZONES
On the other hand, a good chunk of time at the conference was spent focused on the future. Specifically, technology. Articifical intelligence (AI), genetics, and neuropsychology featured more than before. Neuropsychology is the field in which we look at emotions, thoughts, behaviours and where we can find the structures that produce these things in the brain.
Neuropsychology views the brain as the most complex object in the known universe. The technology has now developed to a point where we can understand and target the biology that creates our psychology better than ever before. Brain scans mean we can begin to prove more, understand more and make more associations. For example, brain scans show us how mindfulness physically builds our mental muscles.
Epigenetics is another field getting fresh attention due to technology. We now know that our environment, even our parents’ environment, influences how our genetic codes are read within us. The genetic instruction manual inside each of our cells can be interpreted differently, depending on external factors such as trauma and chronic stress.
A fascinating example found by researchers is that children of Holocaust survivors have shorter telomeres (protective caps on the ends of our Xshaped genetic cells) than children of people who did not go through the trauma. Epigenetics is a field that is showing us the biological effects of our psychological states.
AI, a trendy topic in many conversations, also has a promising future in psychology. AI can provide basic counselling that is completely private, and some presentations at the conference treated the perspectives of research participants who had expressed their preference for AI interventions. These have the potential to be used in areas where human psychologists might not be able to go, including war zones and areas affected by natural disasters.
It is clear that we are not at the point of being able to use AI without human supervision, but we might be able to use AI to deliver services more effectively.
However, testing of AI has revealed that discrimination, stereotypes and prejudice can be unintentionally included in the program. The humans who build the algorithms that enable AI still have biases in their blind spots, simply because they are human. An AI that was taught ideas that were sprouted during colonisation might enact colonisation.
The Sankofa is a bird that flies forwards while looking backwards, and carrying an egg. The image is often associated with decolonisation efforts, the idea of looking backwards to navigate our way forwards.
The PsySSA 2023 conference embodied this tension between the past and the present. On the question of whether hope and healing are attainable for SA, Prof Francis Nyamnjoh used the framework of incompleteness — the idea that we will never reach certainty. Giving up on certainty means that we can stop arguing among ourselves and embrace the information and knowledge rolling in at prolific rates from research and even social media. It is a call to open and equal discussion and collaboration as our best shot at finding what works for different people.
This is not of value only to psychologists. A subtle running theme throughout the conference presentations was the role of stigmatisation and shame in our interventions. Across the latest interventions and best research results, stigmatisation of people requiring or seeking mental health interventions was the party pooper who found fault with any new mental healthcare intervention, ensuring that people were too embarrassed to try them.
If hope and healing are attainable for South Africans, then we need to shake off the shame of normal and natural responses to the difficult circumstances we find ourselves in. Depression, posttraumatic distress, anxiety and grief are all part of the human condition, inevitable where there has been oppression.
Whether we choose to direct our energies into understanding the past or defining the future, our first obstacle might be to stop wasting energy on shame. With open, honest conversations about what hurts and all the options for healing, we might be able to free up energy that was being spent on facades.
Whether decolonisation, AI or decolonised AI bring us hope and healing, the only certainty is that shame cannot.