Professor Kopano Ratele is the Director of the South African Medical Research Council Men, Injury and Violence Research Unit and Professor at the University of South Africa where he runs the Transdisciplinary African Psychologies Programme. His research, teaching, social-political activism, and community mobilization has focused on the men and masculinity, African psychology, violence, class, traditions, sexuality, fatherhood, and race.
Professor Ratele was invited by the Mixing Africa’s Disciplines working group at CAS to present “Orienting Frames: New Thoughts on African Psychologies.” His lecture focused on his most recent book “The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology (2019).” He shared that the popularity of this book in Africa and across the world was due to its focus on understanding Africa from the perspective of Africans and the current “zeitgeist decoloniality.”
The book he is currently writing is inspired in part by the commentary he received on his last book and the questions, “who do we write for?” and “who am I making knowledge for?” Ratele goes on to critique the current academic practice of publishing in journals that are not open access. He also criticizes the push to publish in “international” journals rather than in journals in Nigeria or South Africa. This becomes a problem when the very people that an academic may be writing about may not have access to the knowledge that has been created about them.
His current work touches on “psychological knowledgemaking in relation to research productivity in South Africa.” He says that academia has become a “knowledge production machine which kills knowledge itself” and so has become an “anti-intellectual activity” that kills originality. This in turn disconnects researchers from the people they research and write about. He ended his lecture by referencing the book “Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature” by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and challenging the audience to think critically about who they are writing for and for what ends.