CHAPTER IV: RESULTS AND DISCUSION
4.2. Lived Experience of Being a Black African Female Psychologist
Research Question 1: What are the Black South African female psychologists’ lived experi- ences of career development in the pre- and post-apartheid eras?
The participants in the present study had a range of lived experiences as Black African female psychologists. Two main themes were identified: grappling with the Eurocentric nature of psychology and struggling to translate psychology into a language and practice that is under- stood in one’s community.
4.2.1. Grappling with the Eurocentric Nature of Psychology
Research participants found the Eurocentric nature of psychology challenging in terms of its relevance to service delivery in marginalised Black communities, as the Extracts 1 to 3 illus- trate.
Extract 1 Participant A:
But in terms of applying it [psychology] hundred percent to the community I feel I can not really apply it as the way I learnt it. Because I have a lot of challenges relating to most of the stuff that we learn in schools and I feel that when I get home I’m alienated from everybody because they don’t relate to me.
Researcher: You said like there is a difficulty in the applicability of the stuff we learnt in School, what exactly are you referring to?
Participant A:
Um I’m referring to the fact that what we basically learn in class is basically more Eurocentric; it is more Westernised and the, the kind of definitions of things that we get in psychology you kind of, you don’t relate to anything. Some of the aspects of the theories that we learn. . . are not even from Africa. They are from faraway context[s]
from Europe and America.
Extract 2 Participant H:
Black people . . . don’t know exactly what psychology is so I have first to explain (laughs) what psychology is and then try to help them, that was difficult. I feel like that, like I spend all these years getting all this education and yet I’m unable to help the people that I said wanted to help kind of thing. So I spend all these years adopting this western sort of knowledge that it hasn’t been able to help me when I’m going out to practice.
Extract 3 Participant C:
The therapy side which is you know what we learn like psychoanalysis and all of that they couldn’t care less about it they wouldn’t even want to know about it (laughs) yeah. One of the problems with psychoanalysis, you know and western kinds of psy- chology it’s that people don’t know it.
In the above extracts, the participants expressed their challenges with applying to Black communities the Eurocentric theoretical lore that they had acquired in their professional training programmes in psychology. This finding highlights Maree, Ebersohn and Molepo’s (2006) assertion that there is dissatisfaction with the training programme and evidence that the traditional Western approaches are inadequate to address the South African marginalised groups’ career needs in a relevant way. This is also consistent with Pillay and Kometsi’s
(2007) assertion that psychological training in South Africa is biased in favour of Western- ised, affluent communities.
4.2.2. Struggling to Translate Psychology into a Language and Practice that is Under- stood in One’s Community
The role of language in delivering adequate and relevant services is crucial. However, the challenge often is to find the relevant vocabulary in African languages to convey the message effectively. Extracts 4 and 5 illustrate this point.
Extract 4 Participant C:
And more often than not we find that [we] see Black clients because we have the problem of the White psychologist not being able to speak Zulu. You are trying to find in the Zulu language you know suitable way of saying things and finding definitions, you know while you are speaking to this person you are trying to [find] definitions for what is going [on], how you are going to work with them and [it] is absolutely diffi- cult that is why you get drained.
Another participant expressed her experience with explaining concepts as follows:
Extract 5 Participant B:
Yeah, it is challenging in terms of explaining concepts, ... explaining procedures and I suppose it is because sometimes the procedures are linked to the concepts you can’t separate the two yeah it has been challenging.
The above extracts highlight the scarcity of African language skills within the psychology profession. Black African female psychologists also stress the difficulties they encounter with the lack of vocabulary when rendering services to the Black African population. The present study’s findings are consistent with Pillay and Kramers’ (2003), and Steere and Dowdall’s (1990) findings that most White graduates do not speak an African language. The language
issue as suggested by these authors could be resolved with the increase of Black African trainees. However, the present study’s findings indicate that even Black African female psy- chologists struggle to translate psychology concepts from English into African languages.
Naidoo’s (1996) view of introducing a multicultural curriculum to the psychology training programme could be a viable solution. Furthermore, as noted earlier in the literature, Stead (2004) suggests the inclusion of ‘indigenous psychologies’ would provide an opportunity to include concepts of mental health and the appropriate terminology in African languages, since translating concepts from English into African language has proven to be a laborious task and is often unsuccessful (Musser-Granski & Carillo, 1997; Pillay & Kramers, 2003).