It can seem comic to suggest that African psychology had white fathers. But it also signals the tragic reality: that African psychology in South Africa gets born out of the fatal intimacy between the colonial and the indigenous. And so while one variety of African psychology might inevitably be colonial by birth, it is the mission of another variety of African psychology to resist it, to decolonise it.

All the same, African psychologists, of all creeds, are condemned to live with and work within this entanglement.