Abstract

Indigenous psychologies emerged in the 1970s to the 1990s, and continued to gain a following in the last two decades, with the shared goal of engendering psychologies compatible with home-grown ways of living, valuing, and knowing. The term ‘indigenous’ indicates that these psychologies are founded upon oppositions or resistances to the exotic psychologies colonially implanted and/or outsourced from European or American educational centres. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that the different indigenous psychologies have contributed much to the critiques of psychology. More particularly denounced is a psychology bogged down by ‘endemic amnesia’, having failed to fulfil its professional mandate to the racially and culturally different (Naidoo 1996: 7). By insisting that psychology must become relevant to a people’s sociocultural milieu, indigenous psychologists are like-minded with critical psychologists in transforming psychology from a discipline that has ‘betrayed its promise to understand and help people’ to one that will ‘work for social change rather than against it’ (Parker 2007:1).