An Orienting Conversation on Africa(n)-Centred Decolonial Community Psychologies

In this chapter, we offer a conversation (or rather, a product of an ongoing series of historical and current conversations) whose aim is to orient ourselves and the reader to a number of intellectual, political, practical, and theoretical concerns that surround decolonial Africa(n)-centred community psychologies. In the first part of the chapter, we explore how conversation can serve as a collective and epistemologically just modality of knowledge-making within and for Africa(n)-centred decolonial community psychologies. Conversation, we argue, is able to disrupt, build upon, appreciate and stretch some of the ways by which these psychologies are written, practiced and thought about. In the second part of the chapter, we draw upon this conversational method to consider decolonial Africa(n)-centred community psychologies through a critical, non-psychological knowledge canon. Specifically, we dialogue over what the works of Edward Said, Walter Rodney, and the Combahee River Collective are able to offer those of us who are looking to reimagine community psychologies through Africa(n)-centredness and decoloniality. We conclude by ruminating on the potentialities of form (i.e. conversation) and substance (i.e. the non-psychological canon) for decolonising Africa(n)-centred community psychologies.