by Gomolemo Manana

To study psychology in South Africa is to wrestle with ghosts, those of a past that still clings to our institutions, wrestle with our communities, and even the therapeutic frameworks we’re taught to trust. It’s to prepare to heal others in a system that remains unhealed itself. For many students, especially black South Africans, the journey into this field is not just academic, it’s deeply personal, layered with intergenerational trauma and systemic exclusion. An experience I dare say words cheapen. 

I remember walking into the doors of a lecture hall and believing that in 6 years I would be a Clinical Psychologist in record time, little did I know that would be a pipe dream characterised by a career change and an undying passion towards always speaking out loud and passionately about the changes that must come to fruition in this beloved discipline that is broken, exclusive, disjointed, and painfully out of touch with the needs of the people it is meant to serve. 

Broken? 

What do I mean by it being broken? In a purely South African context, psychological roots are poisoned by the complicity of early white psychologists in the construction of apartheid ideology. I mean we all know that H.F. Verwoed was a trained psychologist. So, the burning and most pertinent question postured before us today is: what has been done to overtly address the authorship of segregation authored by those purported to understand human behaviour? In my view, very little. For many black South Africans, psychology is not a pathway to healing, it’s a remnant of harm. Harm that will not be eradicated by creating a BBBEE based criteria for admission into training programmes. It will not and has not made a dent in overhauling the system for a fraternity so much needed by society in attempting to heal apartheid based psychological trauma for a post-apartheid and postmodern South African Society.  

Broken right? Let’s talk broken academics. It’s more than weird that we are asked to study psychology through frameworks imported from the West. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, psychoanalysis, and other dominant models are taught as gospel truth, often without critique or adaptation. But how can we expect these tools, rooted in individualism and Euro-American cultural assumptions, to work in a nation where trauma is communal, and healing is often found in community, not isolation?

Africans in general are taught to deal with trauma as a collective. The first thought when a family member is sick or has passed away has never been to send my thoughts and prayers. It is to rush there as soon as I can and comfort the family by being with them. Reciting the words such ‘tshidisegang’ or ‘aku ehlanga oku ngehlanga’ as taught by our forefathers. The former meaning that we are here as a community, family members, relatives and friends to help you pass through what I know is and can be an overwhelming flood of emotions, grief, hurt, the list just goes on. The point though, is that we will be there together as a collective until the end of the grieving process and all things associated with it. 

In attempting to heal a broken fragmented society plagued with structural violence I am going to explore what it means to wrestle with ghosts of a discipline that still hangs to its sordid past. One that academic institutions cling on to for dear life. Join me in this series as we further evaluate the challenges of studying psychology, predominantly as a black South African student, and why the current landscape is simply not working for us.