Three decades of psychology in South Africa: legacies of hope and fault lines of the future

• Published in: South African journal of psychology 2024-12, Vol.54 (4), p.423-436
• Main Authors: Bowman, Brett, Malherbe, Nick, Suffla, Shahnaaz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0081-2463; 2078-8208
• DOI: 10.1177/00812463241291202

Three decades have passed since South Africa’s formal transition from apartheid to liberal democracy. This milestone signified a triumph of hope over despair for a country that had struggled under a suffocating system of racist, dehumanising oppression since its colonisation in the seventeenth century. Reflecting this zeitgeist, divisions, and complicities that had characterised the study, practice, and organisation of psychology within South Africa’s racist structures were disassembled. The discipline committed to social justice, inclusive science, liberatory praxis, and global well-being. From a 30-year vantage point that many imagined would represent a clearer picture of a maturing and free rather than an emerging and new South African democracy, this article assesses the discipline’s progress in achieving the socio-political, economic, health and psychological imperatives it set for itself in 1994. Through grounding this analysis in the 10 contributions that constitute this Special Issue, the article pits the promises of struggle and hope against the yields of democracy and its imagined freedoms. It argues that despite the unmistakable continuities of despair that define South African life and the discipline’s response thereto, there are several discernible legacies of hope that psychology has recuperated in its journey thus far, and that these may offer fault lines for a hopeful future. These moments of hope are most powerful when the discipline seeks solidarity rather than solipsism, transcends rather than polices its epistemic and political boundaries, and embraces ordinariness through disavowing the exceptionalism that forecloses its connectedness to several overriding movements that prioritise planetary justice for all.