For generations, many African lives and histories have been told through the eyes of outsiders, often in ways that distorted or erased them. How those stories are retold today matters for identity, dignity, and healing in post-colonial societies.
A new review argues that psychobiography, the in-depth psychological study of a person’s life within its social and historical context, could become a practical tool for decolonising psychology in Africa. It contends that this will only happen if the method itself changes, not just the people it studies.
The narrative literature review, published in Psychology International, was written by Qhawe Agyapong Plaatjie of the Independent Institute of Education, Emeris, Nelson Mandela Bay Campus in Gqeberha, South Africa. It draws on a documented database search, with around 97 papers screened, and synthesises the literature by theme rather than reporting new data.
The review notes that South Africa has become one of the most active centres of academic psychobiography outside North America, with studies of figures such as the anti-apartheid activists Helen Suzman and Beyers Naudé and Chabani Manganyi, the first Black South African clinical psychologist. However, it stresses that simply including African subjects does not make research decolonial.
If a life lived within extended kinship networks, ancestral obligation, and communal personhood is interpreted solely through classical Western theories, the author argues, the subject has changed but the underlying assumptions have not. Genuine decolonisation, the review contends, requires transformation in theory, method, and who holds interpretive authority.
Central to this vision is Ubuntu, an African philosophy that places human flourishing within relationships and community. Applied to psychobiography, this means seeing individual lives as embedded within collective histories, spiritual experience, and wider community networks.
The review also draws on Black Consciousness, a philosophy concerned with restoring dignity and agency to people dehumanised by colonialism and racial oppression. Through this lens, retelling African stories can support consciousness-raising and help people build positive identities.
The author illustrates this with a hypothetical liberation leader who endured long imprisonment. A conventional reading might focus on the individual’s inner development, whereas an Ubuntu-informed approach would also treat interviews with family, elders, and former comrades, as well as oral histories, as primary evidence.
The review proposes practical changes to training in clinical and counselling psychology. These include reflexive journals, supervised consultation with a subject’s family or community before interpretations are finalised, and assignments comparing Western and African relational readings of the same life episode.
It also points to friction with university ethics committees, which are usually built around consent from single individuals. The author suggests researchers develop protocols that include community-level consent, ongoing review by communities, and a fair return of benefits.
The review acknowledges limitations, including its restriction to English-language publications and reliance on a single reviewer’s judgement. It calls for community-engaged studies, comparisons across African regions, and formal evaluation of the proposed teaching methods.
The author concludes that a properly decolonised psychobiography could offer African psychology a teachable and replicable way to turn critique into everyday practice. In doing so, it could help restore dignity to lives and histories that have long been misrepresented.
