Can Psychology Help Spur the Re-Birth of African Civilization? Notes on the African Personality (Psychological Africanity) Construct: Normalcy, Development, and Abnormality

We must redesign the Afrikan personality serve us through these difficult times. Del Jones (1992, 109) African Personality: A Clarion Call? Frantz Fanon (1963, 316) entreated Africans to set afoot a new man [sic]. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. encouraged social scientists play a role in bringing about and ideological changes in Negroes (King, 1968, 183). Amos Wilson (1989) acknowledged dissatisfaction with many male African-U.S. (descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States) and admonished emphatically another man. John Henrik Clarke (1997, xvii) pointed the continuation of this social engineering imperative for the African descent person (ADP) whether man, woman, or child: the twenty-first century.... first we change ourselves. Caucasian Canadian Michael Bradley (1992) pleaded for the direction the change must take: I cannot help but make a plea: African Americans must forsake the white man's social structures, concepts of justice and, yes, even religion and return, as far as possible, genuine African values and identity (insofar as these can be accurately recovered and reconstructed). (243-244) Bradley's plea may be applied equally worldwide populations of ADPs in light of global domination of them by Eurasian civilizations historically and at present (Azibo, 2012; Horne, 2007; Jones, 1992; Rajshekar, 1987, 1992; Nikam, 1998; Rodney, 1974; Wilson, 1998). These clarion calls or pleas and Jones's epigraph would seem suggest the need for reemergence of the African personality. As well, knowing the contours or parameters of the ordered, appropriately functioning African personality as dictated by the African personality construct would seem imperative for undertaking efforts for its social engineering and for making accurate diagnoses of disorder and identifications of inappropriate psychological functioning. The African Personality? Fathoming the Very Idea. Recently, the International Journal of Psychology (2006) recognized a role for indigenous psychologies definable as scientific investigations (mostly) of concepts about behavior and experience from an emic framework meaning within the cultural traditions of the group under study, preferably using its own emic terminology. Indigenous psychologies, then, may provide important alternatives Western-based psychological knowledge which, in turn, may yield variations and communalities that could provide the basic material create a more truly pan-human psychology.... [a] more representative (International, 2006) as emic knowledge can bring about etic knowledge. As the idea of a folk or cultural psychology peculiar different populations is not new (Benj afield, 1996; Murphy & Kovak, 1972) it is no surprise that in its Western psychology origins it is fired with racism and ethnocentrism. Wundt's folk psychology, for example, was developed within his society's obsession at the time, identified as German romantic tendency emphasize white racial superiority and the Germans as the pure race (Onyewuenyi, 2005, 91). In contrast, the circumspect assessment of the Eurasian collective as Johnny-come-lately and differentially developed in their humanity as overall pitiably pejorative by Nilotic African civilization attributed a non-supremacist, environmental causality (Moore, 1986, 242) distally responsible. For example, [d]uring the twenty-first century B.C., the pharaoh Merikare [pointed out] ... 'Lo the miserable Asiatic, He is wretched because of the place he's in, short of water, bare of wood, it's paths are many and painful because of mountains, he does not dwell in one place, food propels his ego, he fights since the time of Horus' (Carruthers, 1999, 22-23). This observation is best explained by Diop's 2-cradle theory (Carruthers, 1984, 57-72; Diop, 1978b, 55-113; Wobogo, 1976), which if correct that human consciousness has been modified since the very earliest days by the particular experiences undergone in communities which developed separately. …

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