Dr Wahbie Long of the University of Cape Town has said that

It is not incorrect that the interrogation of the definition of African psychology recuperates rows about African identity. Few terms are as generative of heated debate – indeed, of division – in racial and cultural discussions as the term ‘African’ itself. And this makes sense. For many African women and men, not only fluid, non-binary trans and genderqueer Africans, the term ‘African’ itself, distinct from matters of gender and sexuality, can be marked by a sense of loss, a sense of being unmoored, of rupture or rootlessness. This sense is often due to the force of slavocratic, colonial, apartheid, military and corrupt regimes which can cut a people from their history. Africanness can be, for some people, bedevilled by feelings of unanchoredness and insecurity.

A preoccupation of a certain African subject who lives in a very modern city like Cape Town, or a city outside of Africa like Los Angeles, is not necessarily with the attractions of a modern life, such as the latest technology or a holiday in an exotic destination like Bali. Instead, Africa as an object of continuous experience can be this person's principal anxiety. The concern is not with how to be modern in contemporary Africa, but with how to be true, how to be faithful, to the fact of being African while being global in your choices, yearnings, uncertainties and exultations.