Decolonising South African psychology depends on measurement and training reform more than on adding Ubuntu

Introduction

Ask most South African psychology students what decolonising the discipline means and Ubuntu comes up within a minute. It is easy to see why. Botho and Ubuntu give psychologists a vocabulary of personhood, community and spirituality that the standard textbooks do not have, and writers such as Sodi et al. (2021) present them as foundational for knowledge produced in and for Africa. Yet the discipline’s problems were never only about missing concepts. Ratele (2024) argues that many psychologists and psychology students remain epistemically unfree, thirty years after 1994, because they still think and work inside an American-centric frame.

This paper argues that adding Africentric content is necessary but will not decolonise South African psychology on its own. The harder changes sit in three other places, namely how the discipline measures people, who gets trained to do the measuring, and how it treats identities such as race as things to be understood historically and not as fixed boxes (Laher, 2024; Pirtle, 2023). I begin with what Africentric and Ubuntu approaches offer and where they are tested, then look at the discipline’s epistemic dependence, then at assessment and mental health care, and last at race, identity and the profession itself. Throughout I try to say where the evidence is thin, because much of this literature is argument and reflection more than data (Macleod et al., 2024; Sodi et al., 2021).

What Africentric and Ubuntu approaches add, and where they are tested

The strongest case for Africentric psychology is that it names things Western frameworks leave out. Sodi et al. (2021) take an Afrocentric position, admit their own cultural locatedness, and set out four key elements of botho, which are African spirituality, botho as personhood, botho and interconnectedness, and botho and communalism. They conclude that botho is a valid human experience and should be treated as a foundational building block for African knowledge production. That is a persuasive argument as far as it goes, but it is an insider reflection, so it tells us what botho means to the authors and says little about how many people live it that way, or how. Insider writing of this kind has real value, since it lets people describe their own concepts in their own terms (Sodi et al., 2021), but it sits in the discipline as a proposal waiting for testing, and the two obvious tests are whether the concepts hold up among varied participants and whether they change what psychologists do in a clinic or a classroom (Letsoalo et al., 2024).

One of the few empirical checks comes from outside South Africa. Rotzinger et al. (2025) interviewed 23 Namibian and Kenyan emerging adults aged 18 to 20 about Ubuntu, noting that most writing on the concept had been theoretical and not empirical. The participants identified strongly with Ubuntu values and practised them in old and new ways, and the four themes the authors developed included a plain account of costs, such as freeloaders and restrictions. Some also wanted more autonomy in education and spirituality (Rotzinger et al., 2025). Twenty-three young people in two other countries cannot stand in for South Africa, but the pattern is worth taking seriously. If Ubuntu is lived with both pride and friction, then a psychology that treats it as a settled essence risks swapping one universal template for another.

Letsoalo et al. (2024) push the argument into mental health care. They contend that the prevailing focus on Western approaches to mental illness marginalises indigenous beliefs and risks pathologising the African experience of mental health through psychiatrisation and medicalisation, and they call for a formal, integrative model that combines African and Western approaches. I find the diagnosis convincing and the prescription underspecified. Integration is an attractive word, but South Africa has many cultural and language communities, and an abstract call for combining ‘African’ and ‘Western’ ideas does not say whose beliefs, which practitioners, or how a clinic would tell whether it was working (Letsoalo et al., 2024; Sodi et al., 2021). That gap is where most of the real decolonising work seems to lie, and no amount of enthusiasm for African concepts closes it unless someone does the slower job of testing what works in particular settings.

The discipline’s epistemic dependence

Ratele’s (2024) point is sharper than a complaint about curriculum. He argues that to become a free psychologist one has to move away from American-centric White epistemology and White ignorance towards situated epistemologies and practice. This is a claim about habits of thought, such as which theories count as general and which count as local. It also explains why adding a lecture on Ubuntu to an otherwise unchanged course can leave the underlying assumptions where they were, because the new material is read through the old frame (Ratele, 2024; Macleod et al., 2024).

The research record gives some support for that worry. Macleod et al. (2024) did a situational analysis of papers in the South African Journal of Psychology and of PsycINFO abstracts carrying the keyword South Africa over five years, and compared them with an earlier review that used the same method. They found more papers using ‘hard’ science approaches and fewer using systems-oriented theories, with assessment still a major topic. They also reported low attention to several key psychosocial issues, under-representation of people in poorer provinces and of young and older people, and fewer collaborations with other African or South American countries (Macleod et al., 2024). On the positive side, production is increasingly led by South African scholars or by people at South African institutions. Their conclusion is that substantial work remains before knowledge production meets the aim of distributive epistemic justice.

Read together, the two articles are uncomfortable for anyone who thinks the work is largely done. Thirty years after democracy, Macleod et al. (2024) describe a research base moving towards ‘hard’ science approaches and away from systems-oriented theory, while Ratele (2024) describes a discipline that finds it hard to think outside imported categories. Meanwhile botho is being argued for as a foundation of the discipline in the same journal (Sodi et al., 2021). The mismatch suggests that the visible, symbolic decolonising has run ahead of the structural kind. I would not push this too far, since a situational analysis of publications cannot show what happens in classrooms or clinics, but it is a fair warning about where the energy has actually gone. It also hints at a quieter problem, which is that the call to decolonise can be answered in a paper without anything changing in the practice that follows.

A fair objection is that content does matter, and that curricula shape what students can imagine doing. I think that is right. Auld (2025), for instance, reports that students on a decolonially framed experiential programme were pushed to question inherited ways of knowing. The disagreement is about sufficiency. Content changes the conversation, but the conversation then meets test batteries, training programmes and research outlets that were set up under other assumptions (Macleod et al., 2024; Ratele, 2024). Where the surrounding machinery stays put, new content may simply be absorbed as one more topic, which would leave the underlying frame as it was.

Measures and the limits of imported tools

If decolonisation is going to change practice, assessment is the obvious place to look. Laher (2024) notes that assessments are typically developed in the Global North and used across the world, resting on a universalist assumption that has been challenged for about thirty years because experiences differ across cultures and social conditions. South Africa’s own history is awkward here. Psychological assessment arrived as a Western import and was complicit in upholding the apartheid regime, and although the 1990s brought profound shifts, access and distribution problems have persisted. The rushed move to online assessment during COVID-19 widened access but kept other inequalities in place (Laher, 2024). Her agenda stresses inclusion, indigenisation and innovation, with accessibility, relevance and responsiveness as the aims.

Two things follow, and I think they pull in different directions. First, Macleod et al. (2024) found assessment is still a major topic in South African psychology research, which implies that a good deal of what the discipline does runs through tests and scales. A decolonising effort that ignores them leaves most of the working discipline untouched. Second, indigenisation does not simply mean building an Ubuntu scale. Rotzinger et al. (2025) show that young people hold Ubuntu with ambivalence, so a single instrument would probably flatten differences between regions, languages and generations. Better to ask what a tool is for, who it will be used on and what happens to them afterwards, which is closer to Laher’s accessibility and responsiveness than to a quick swap of items. It would also keep the profession honest about its history, since the apartheid-era complicity that Laher (2024) describes shows what happens when tools are applied to people without asking whether they fit.

The same logic applies to diagnosis. Letsoalo et al. (2024) warn that treating Western categories as the default risks psychiatrising and medicalising African experience. That does not mean distress should be explained away as culture, which would be its own mistake. A realistic position is that categories and instruments should be treated as hypotheses about a particular population, tested locally and revised, with practitioners trained to ask what a symptom means to the person who has it (Laher, 2024; Letsoalo et al., 2024). It is slower than adopting a ready-made tool, but it is basically what indigenisation requires.

Race, identity and the people who do the psychology

Race is the second place where imported assumptions bite. Pirtle (2023) studied how 50 adults identify racially in South Africa, starting from the fact that the apartheid state crafted Coloured identities as a position that was both neither and between White and Black. She found that identity choices were shaped by changes in the racial state, and described four routes, which were reappropriating ‘Coloured’, joining ‘Black’, constructing a Khoisan identity, and a non-racialist ‘Human’ identity. The lesson for psychology is that racial identity here is historically produced, plural and still moving. A measure that assumes a fixed set of racial categories, or one developmental sequence for everyone, would miss most of this, and so would a decolonial approach that speaks of ‘the African’ as one thing (Pirtle, 2023; Rotzinger et al., 2025).

It is worth being clear about what this does and does not show. Pirtle’s (2023) study reads as a sociological one, not a psychological one, and its sample of 50 is a qualitative one, so it cannot tell us how common each identity choice is. What it can do is warn that any psychological work on race in South Africa needs to start by asking how people place themselves. That is a more demanding standard than borrowing a racial identity model from another country and checking that the reliability coefficients look acceptable. It also fits Ratele’s (2024) call for situated epistemologies, since a situated account of race begins with the particular history of racial classification here.

Identity is also about who is in the room. Munro and McCullough (2024) used graduation data from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, which had produced at least 469 professional psychology master’s graduates, and found that only 43.9 per cent were Black African and that the average year-on-year increase in Black African graduates was only 9.7 per cent between 2005 and 2020. Their forecast puts national race-based representativity in the 2026 cohort and provincial representativity in 2028, despite concerted institutional efforts. This is one institution, so it cannot be generalised, but it shows how slowly even a determined university moves. It matters for decolonisation because a profession that does not look like the people it serves may well keep asking the old questions (Ratele, 2024). It also matters for the students already inside, who are the ones carrying whatever changes the institution manages to make, and that brings us to what their training is like.

Getting people in is not the same as keeping them comfortable. Lakay and Salie (2025) used interpretive phenomenological analysis to study black clinical psychology students at a historically white institution in the Western Cape after their first master’s year, and identified two broad themes, namely segregation, alienation and othering, and the psychological experiences of perceived othering. The authors conclude that the programme, despite many changes, still led to feelings of alienation and segregation, and they call for further research on how first-year students might be supported to process these experiences. That is a modest finding with a blunt implication, which is that changes to a programme do not by themselves stop it feeling like somebody else’s place to the people newly admitted (Lakay & Salie, 2025). Auld (2025) suggests one response. Twenty-nine postgraduate psychology students took part over two years in an educational tour of the Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre, which the author describes as a generative third space where students confronted intergenerational trauma and worked on reflexivity. The study concludes that experiential learning within a decolonial framework can destabilise inherited epistemologies, although it also records moments of resistance. Auld’s evidence is qualitative and drawn from one initiative, so I would treat it as a promising example and not a proven model (Auld, 2025; Lakay & Salie, 2025).

Conclusion

The argument of this paper is that decolonising South African psychology is mostly an institutional and methodological job, and a conceptual one only in part. Africentric and Ubuntu ideas deserve their place, and Sodi et al. (2021) make a fair case for them. But the empirical work suggests Ubuntu is lived with mixed feelings (Rotzinger et al., 2025), the research base has been moving towards ‘hard’ science approaches (Macleod et al., 2024), assessment still carries a Global North inheritance (Laher, 2024), and the profession is changing slowly and sometimes uncomfortably for the black students entering it (Lakay & Salie, 2025; Munro & McCullough, 2024).

The evidence has limits that should be stated plainly. Much of it is conceptual or reflective, the empirical studies are small and tied to single institutions, and the one Ubuntu study is from Namibia and Kenya. I did not find evidence that a decolonised curriculum or a locally built test improves outcomes for the people psychologists serve. What I would take from this is a modest agenda. Test imported measures locally before relying on them, treat racial identities as historical and plural, and invest in the pipeline and in teaching that make a different kind of psychologist possible (Ratele, 2024; Pirtle, 2023). Ubuntu can sit inside all of that, but it cannot carry the whole load. If the next decade of South African psychology produces more courses on botho and the same imported tests, the same shortage of black clinicians and the same alienation in training, then the discipline will have changed its vocabulary and little else (Lakay & Salie, 2025; Laher, 2024).

Reference list

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