This influential paper, De-colonizing our lives: Divining a post-colonial therapy, is by Makungu Akinyela. Within it he describes his hopes for an African centred therapy:

It is my hope that African centred therapy could provide African individuals and families a space to talk about their lives, to make sense of their relationships, free from the interpretations and judgments of dominant Eurocentric culture. It is my hope that a post-colonial therapy could offer a ‘liberated territory’ in which New Afrikan people could re-value their lives before heading back into a world that is so often hostile to the hopes and dreams of our people.

Alongside the quest to generate African centred ways of working, Motswana postcolonial scholar Professor Bagele Chilisa is involved in decolonising research, resisting the domination of Western knowledge, working with Indigenous worldviews, and introducing accountability and collaboration with people and communities who are the subjects of research. Bagele Chilisa speaks about this in these interviews ‘Indigenous research is a journey’ and ‘Decolonising research’.

These efforts are resonant with the call from the Africa Social Work network to develop models that rely on Afro-centric systems of Indigenous knowledge, community-based interventions, and local values and practices.

We hope this resource can in some way contribute to this wider project and we look forward to more collaborations with the Africa Social Work network.

We close this chapter by returning to Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo’s Imbeleko approach: