History of Psychology © 2012 American Psychological Association

2013, Vol. 16, No. 1, 19 –35 1093-4510/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0029675

RETHINKING “RELEVANCE”:
South African Psychology in Context
Wahbie Long
University of Cape Town

This article examines the phenomenon known as the “relevance debate” in South
African psychology. It begins with a historical overview of the contours of the
discipline in that country before describing the controversy’s international dimensions,
namely, the revolutionary politics of 1960s higher education and the subsequent
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emergence of cognate versions of the debate in American, European, and “Third

World” psychology. The article then details how South Africa’s “relevance” project
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enjoyed a special affinity with an assortment of ethnic-cultural, national, and continen-

tal myths and metaphors, all of which served the interests of the political formations of
the day. It discusses how, in present-day South Africa, the intelligentsia has become an
important catalyst for the so-called African Renaissance, which seeks to provide
“relevant” solutions for the regeneration of African society. However, the global
hegemony of what began in the 1970s as a “second academic revolution,” aided by the
lifting of the academic boycott of South Africa, has blunted the once critical edge of
“relevance” discourse. A new mode of knowledge production now holds sway, the
outcome of a dramatic reformulation of the capitalist manifesto in which the values of
the “May 68” generation have been hijacked by a managerialist rationality. In light of
the capitalization of the knowledge-production enterprise, it is concluded that the idiom
of “relevance” has outlived its usefulness.

Keywords: relevance, knowledge production, South Africa, apartheid, African Renaissance

For several decades, psychology in South Af-
rica has fielded awkward questions about its
academic and professional “relevance.” Criti-
cisms are framed nowadays in terms of the
skewed racial demographics of the country’s
psychologists and counselors, the inability of
most practitioners to speak indigenous African
languages, the discipline’s continuing Eurocen-
trism, and the perceived failure to respond ap-
propriately to post-apartheid policy imperatives.
It may simply be down to a conceptual plasticity
of sorts that the pertinence of “relevance” has
endured. But when undergraduate psychology
students, unfamiliar with the nuances of the
debate, comment matter-of-factly on their cho-
sen field of study’s unsuitability for the national
life, some modicum of explanation is required
This article was published Online First October 8, 2012.
This research was supported in part by grants from the
University Research Committee and the National Research
Foundation.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Wahbie Long, Department of Psychology, University of Cape
Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, Western Cape, South
Africa. E-mail: wahbie.long@uct.ac.za
19
that can account for the recalcitrance of “rele-
vance” talk.
In this article, it is observed that apartheid-era
calls for “relevance” were wedded to conserva-
tive, progressive and radical politics alike. In
recent years, however, these have been super-
seded by a newfangled rendering of “relevance”
that, in contemporary parlance, does the rounds
as “engaged scholarship,” “social responsive-
ness,” and such like. Contrary to what they
suggest, these terms obscure an altogether more
significant trend: the relentless commercializa-
tion of the academy. Accordingly, the central
claim of this article is that the introduction of
democratic rule in South Africa and its reentry
into the international community facilitated the
insertion of its academy into the global intellec-
tual order, which, at the time, two decades in the
making, encouraged, above all, the commodifi-
cation of knowledge. “Relevance” was reduced
to little more than a catch phrase in funding
applications and mission statements. By tracing
the concatenation of politics, knowledge pro-
duction, and “relevance” discourse vis-à-vis
South African psychology and beyond, the re-
mainder of this article will attempt to illustrate
 20 LONG
how it was that “relevance” itself became
irrelevant.
South African Psychology and the
“Relevance” Debate
Psychology in South Africa developed rap-
idly in the 1920s when John Dunston, a British
psychiatrist and the country’s first Commis-
sioner for Mental Hygiene, returned from an
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official tour of England, Europe, and the United
States. Realizing that mental health care could
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extend beyond the bare provision of custodial
services, Dunston introduced a series of inter-
ventions, including the appointment of psychol-
ogists and the standardization of intelligence
tests for South African conditions (Minde,
1975). His views on African intelligence, how-
ever, were unflattering: Dunston believed that
Africans were appreciably less intelligent than
Whites, were short on initiative, did not learn
from experience, and lacked the reasoning skills
for becoming paranoid (Dunston, 1923, cited in
Seedat & MacKenzie, 2008). Moreover, his
ideas about Black inferiority dovetailed seam-
lessly with the as-yet-untested notion of a “hi-
erarchy of races,” advocated in 1920 by the
Eugenics and Genetics Standing Committee of
the South African Association for the Advance-
ment of Science. In need of scientific validation,
here was a challenge tailor-made for the minis-
trations of psychological expertise (Louw,
1997).
Yet the discipline’s most meaningful
achievement during the interwar years stemmed
from its involvement in the Carnegie Commis-
sion’s Poor White Study. The so-called poor
white problem had raised concerns about sexual
relations across the color line, which, it was
speculated, resulted from the social equality of
poor Whites and “the great mass of non-
Europeans . . . This impairs the tradition which
counteracts miscegenation, and the social color
divisions are noticeably weakening” (Gross-
kopf, 1932, p. xx). The poor white problem
afforded psychologists the opportunity of dem-
onstrating the usefulness of psychometric tech-
niques in addressing such problems, which they
accomplished with extraordinary success
(Louw, 1986). On the other hand, South African
psychology, from its inception, aligned itself
with the precepts of scientific racism, which, in
turn, served the mission of apartheid capitalism
(Seedat & MacKenzie, 2008).
The postwar period saw the institutionaliza-
tion of Afrikaner apartheid rule and the increas-
ing isolation of South African academia in
continental Europe and Britain. The National
Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR), estab-
lished in 1946 and staffed initially by air force
psychologists that had made important contri-
butions to the mobilization effort, was instru-
mental in generating knowledge concerning the
adaptability of African labor. Funded by state and
industry, the NIPR’s unwritten mandate was to
discover “how white-owned industries could best
expropriate and exploit the labor of the African
workforce” (Seedat & MacKenzie, 2008, p. 80).
Beginning in the 1970s, however, psychologists
were increasingly called upon to defuse a rising
working-class militancy. A discernible shift in po-
litical momentum was afoot, epitomized by the
failure of Christian Nationalism, mounting local
and international condemnation of the wide-
ranging depredations of apartheid policy, and,
with respect to psychology, a not-too-distant re-
volt against an Afrikaner-led profession. The
promulgation in 1974 of the Afrikaans Medium
Decree contributed significantly to what would
become the Soweto riots of 1976, followed in
1977 by the death in detention of the Black Con-
sciousness leader, Steve Biko. Along with the not
inconsiderable regional turmoil of those years—
particularly in Angola, Mozambique, and Rhode-
sia—these developments meant that, from the
mid-1970s onward, the apartheid state lurched
from one crisis to the next in a steady trajectory of
terminal decline.
It is worth noting that, by the late 1970s,
South Africa’s first Black psychologist, Cha-
bani Manganyi, had been writing about the
Black experience of political oppression for
some years (see, e.g., Manganyi, 1973). Mang-
anyi’s early contributions, significantly, were
made during the apogee of apartheid rule, yet it
was only with the writing already on the wall
that developments in the professional main-
stream started reflecting what was going on in
the country and beyond. From 1978, the Afri-
kaner Whites-only psychology association, the
Psychological Institute of the Republic of South
Africa (PIRSA), in an intimation of a growing
rapprochement with its rival association, back-
tracked on its founding ethos of racial separat-
ism by holding joint conferences with the ra-
 RETHINKING “RELEVANCE” IN SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHOLOGY
cially integrated South African Psychological
Association (SAPA). In 1982, the two societies
buried their hatchet to form the Psychological
Association of South Africa (PASA). The new
association, however, failed to convince many
progressive psychologists, who interpreted the
merger as a pragmatic gesture aimed at facili-
tating statutory recognition of the profession. In
1983, in a display of questionable judgment, the
Institute of Family and Marital Therapy hosted
an international conference at Sun City—a
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gambling and entertainment center in a Bantu-
stan “setting which is responsible for the
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break-up of thousands of [Black] families” (Vo-
gelman, 1987, p. 24). An ad hoc committee of
disenchanted mental health professionals and
students formed the Organisation for Appropri-
ate Social Services in South Africa (OASSSA),
dedicating itself “to work only with those who
are the victims of oppression” (Anonymous,
n.d., p. 2). In the same year, the critical psy-
chology journal Psychology in Society was
launched to “contribut[e] to serious debate and
understanding of a psychology which is clearly
at a cross-roads . . . [and] is being torn apart by
its inability to contribute meaningfully to a
South African society increasingly in the throes
of a deep structural crisis” (“Editorial,” 1983, p.
1). By the late 1980s, the White-run OASSSA
was deemed not radical enough by Black psy-
chologists who founded the Psychology and
Apartheid Committee instead—with the curious
outcome that psychology’s resistance to apart-
heid was organized mostly along racial lines
(Foster, 2008; Suffla, Stevens, & Seedat, 2001;
Yen, 2008).
With the state apparatus now unraveling, crit-
ical psychologists slammed the discipline’s in-
different response to the human rights abuses of
the day, accusing it of lacking “relevance.”
They pointed out, variously, that the discipline
was culturally insensitive (Holdstock, 1979,
1981a, 1981b), bourgeois (Turton, 1986), polit-
ically indifferent (Anonymous, 1986; Dawes,
1985; Liddell & Kvalsvig, 1990; Mauer,
Marais, & Prinsloo, 1991; Strümpfer, 1981),
economically inaccessible (Berger & Lazarus,
1987; Vogelman, 1987), and theoretically im-
poverished (Gilbert, 1989). It came as no sur-
prise when, at its national conference in 1994,
South African psychology admitted its silent
complicity with apartheid rule (de la Rey &
Ipser, 2004). Weighed down by a long and
21
detailed involvement with racist ideology (S.
Cooper, Nicholas, Seedat, & Statman, 1990;
Duncan, van Niekerk, de la Rey, & Seedat,
2001; Foster, 1991; Magwaza, 2001), the disci-
pline was forced to confront its past in a manner
that, for a hundred years, it had asked its pa-
tients to do.
A generation later, questions persist about the
“relevance” of psychology for the lives of the
majority of South Africans. Claims of profes-
sional “irrelevance” are substantiated by refer-
ring variously to the skewed racial demograph-
ics of the country’s registered psychologists and
counselors (Pillay & Siyothula, 2008), the
dearth of qualified professionals that speak in-
digenous African languages (Ahmed & Pillay,
2004), biased selection criteria for admission
into professional training programs (Stevens,
2001), and the uneven racial composition of
selection panels (Mayekiso, Strydom, Jithoo, &
Katz, 2004). In respect to academic psychology,
concerned intellectuals have been arguing since
the late 1970s that psychological theories re-
main beholden to American and European (es-
pecially Germanic) explanations of human
functioning (Holdstock, 1981a; Turton, 1986)
and that the paradigmatic inclinations of psy-
chology are in keeping with “the worldview of
the colonizer” (Ahmed & Pillay, 2004). Others
criticize what they imagine as the implied alter-
native, namely, the reification of culture and
relegation of class, with all its evocations of
apartheid-style characterizations of cultural dif-
ference (Nell, 1990; Seedat & Nell, 1990;
Swartz, 1991; Turton, 1986). For those sympa-
thetic to an Afrocentric psychology, however, it
remains a largely marginal endeavor, leading
one commentator to remark that psychologists
in South Africa are in fact without a psychology
(Ratele, 2004). And on the research front, sug-
gestions have been made of continuing indiffer-
ence to sociopolitical priorities—as in, for ex-
ample, an analysis of articles appearing in the
South African Journal of Psychology between
1999 and 2003, according to which a mere 2%
of articles dealt with the issue of HIV/AIDS,
while a further 2% handled that of “race” (Ma-
cleod, 2004). Whether in theory, practice, or
research, the slow-moving transformation of
psychology in South Africa remains a focus of
concern.
 22 LONG
Conceptualizing “Relevance”
As far as the history of South African psy-
chology is concerned, it may be said that
“relevance” functions typically as an adjective:
disciplinary conventions are either lauded as
“relevant” or dismissed as “irrelevant.” The ad-
jectival form of “relevance,” however, obscures
a historical significance that can be enabled
through a focus on its nominal usage. “Rele-
vance” is then transformed into a concept that,
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like any other, carries a certain history. It in-
vokes, specifically, the troubled antinomy in-
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habited by science and society, reminding one
that the notion of “science for its own sake” is
nowadays difficult to sustain (Harding, 1991).
The scientific rationale is no longer considered
a self-evident truth: It is subject to changing
societal contingencies that, over the centuries,
have asked different things of science (Hessels,
Van Lente, & Smits, 2009). The production of
knowledge has been associated with values and
institutions for at least the past 400 years and
has been “nationalized” increasingly over the
last century and a half (Pestre, 2003). Science is
a fundamentally social exercise: As an intellec-
tual practice, research is located within a wider,
rule-bound community of practice that is itself
immersed in hegemonic societal configurations.
“Relevance” in Context
Demands for “relevance” are peculiar to nei-
ther psychology nor South Africa. A striking
precedent can be seen in the worldwide calls for
educational “relevance” in the 1960s, first made
by disaffected university students and subse-
quently taken up by their teachers (Rotenst-
reich, 1972). Historical scrutiny indicates that,
in America, the young people that railed against
the “irrelevance” of their educations were not
the working-class victims of epistemic violence
but, rather, a well-to-do generation scandalized
by the moral hypocrisy of preceding ones. Stu-
dent protesters were sympathizing in effect with
those they deemed “less fortunate” than them-
selves (Keniston, 1970, p. 162). In the rarefied
atmosphere of higher learning, they came to the
conclusion that there was little on offer that
could prepare them for entry into a society
traumatized by racism and war (Sampson,
1970). Their German doppelgängers were sim-
ilarly “the first generation that [knew] no eco-
nomic insecurity and relative poverty [yet]
openly perceive[d] the disproportion between
the potential wealth and potential gratification
of an industrially developed society, and the
actual life of the masses in that society” (Haber-
mas, 1971, p. 24). Around the world, in fact, the
inner circles of student activists seemed to have
enjoyed distinctly bourgeois upbringings
(Boudon, 1971)—an ironic state of affairs, given
their unmitigated rubbishing of the very institu-
tions, along with vast armies of functionaries, that
had promoted their interests so devotedly.
On both sides of the Atlantic, emancipatory
anticapitalist sentiments demanded reforms in
knowledge production, finding resonance espe-
cially among the social sciences. A clutch of
American universities was forced into a reflex-
ive rethinking of their modus operandi. Euro-
pean student protests, in connection with a host
of social issues—totalitarian governance, nu-
clear proliferation, environmental degradation,
homophobia, and the like— brought about anal-
ogous, yet more thoroughgoing, consequences.
Young European radicals, committed to a trans-
disciplinary agenda of social and academic
transformation, had found inspiration in critical
theory and the Frankfurt School— despite the
school’s own misgivings. For the latter, mobi-
lization had become an end in itself, risking its
own undoing through the privatization of “alter-
nativeness” and an aimless “new actionism”
(Habermas, 1971, p. 26). The ensuing dissolution
of the student movement seemed to vindicate this
skepticism, while a corporatist assimilation of
May 1968 values (Pestre, 2003) ensured that the
students’ main legacy would be one of “libertari-
anism which came to be appropriated by a Right
eager to dismantle bureaucracies and the welfare
state” (Müller, 2002, p. 33).
In the so-called Third World, meanwhile,
critics insisted that the “colonial aftermath” was
a contradiction in terms on the grounds that
postcoloniality was located at the onset—rather
than the termination— of colonial rule (Gandhi,
1998). Newly liberated societal energies were
sublimated in the euphoria of independence, the
groundswell of anti-Western nationalism, the
twin imperatives of development and change,
popular uprisings against political oppression
and more general social contradictions, and this
coincided with discerning calls for the decoloni-
zation of everyday consciousness (Fanon, 2008),
knowledge institutions (al-Attas, 1985; al-Faruqi,
 RETHINKING “RELEVANCE” IN SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHOLOGY
1982), and the educated class (Mazrui, 1978).
Within the academy, this revolt against “cultural
dependency” (Mazrui, 1978, p. 13)—Fanon
(2008) called it “imitativeness”—would be taken
up in the form of discipline-specific debates about
“relevance.” The problem, however, was that the
imported Western disciplinary order was “a par-
ticular manifestation of . . . how western civiliza-
tion sees its problems. . . . It has no real meaning
for nonwestern cultures” (Sardar, 2005, p. 200). In
such contexts, intradisciplinary problematizations
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of “relevance” were consequently difficult to
resolve.
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The “Irrelevance” of American Psychology
Against this backdrop of international ap-
peals for educational “relevance,” a standout
event in the history of American psychology
occurred on September 1, 1969, when the pres-
ident of the American Psychological Associa-
tion (APA), George Miller, was introduced at
the annual convention of the APA. The theme
for that year’s convention had been dubbed
“Psychology and the Problems of Society” and
Miller’s (1969) imminent address would itself
become a watershed moment in American psy-
chology’s debate on “relevance.” Unexpect-
edly, though, a group of students emerged from
the audience and approached the stage, resulting
in the APA president ceding the podium to these
representatives of the Black Students Psycho-
logical Association (BPSA). Gary Simkins, na-
tional chairman of the BPSA, proposed that the
student organization present a list of demands,
the following day, to the APA Council of Rep-
resentatives (Simpkins & Raphael, 1970). As it
turned out, the council debated the list for six
hours, eventually endorsing the proposal. What
it validated was a five-pronged student-driven
plea for equitable selection procedures for en-
trance into professional psychology training
programs, aggressive recruitment of Black aca-
demics into psychology departments, financial
assistance for Black students, practical commu-
nity experience for Black trainees, and terminal
programs at all degree levels— each of which
was premised, in varying degrees of explicit-
ness, on the felt “irrelevance” of psychology for
Black America.
On another front altogether, artifact and eth-
ics crises in psychological experimentation had
undermined the real-world applicability of so-
23
cial psychological theory (Baumrind, 1964;
Orne, 1962; Rosenthal, 1966), inaugurating “the
age of relevance in social psychology” (Ros-
now, 1981, p. 78). In an influential article, Ken-
neth Ring (1967) framed the corrupting and
aimless flamboyance of experimental social
psychology as a defensive posturing against the
a priori vacuousness of the field; the “frivolity”
of it all could only be countered by, among
other things, initiating research of broad human
importance. In a similarly devastating indict-
ment of social psychology, Kenneth Gergen’s
(1973) central thesis was that social psycholog-
ical facts were mostly unrepeatable and that the
preeminent experimental method was, there-
fore, entirely inadequate as a method of enquiry.
Gergen argued that a “feedback loop” charac-
terized the relationship between psychological
science and society; this was the result of a
combination of prescriptive bias in psychologi-
cal theory, the nonexistence of naı̈ve subjects,
and the influence of Western cultural values on
subjectivity (specifically, freedom and individ-
uality). The upshot was that “social psychology
alters the behavior it seeks to study” (Gergen,
1973, p. 314)—that is, social psychological the-
ory invalidated itself precisely because of its
relationship with society. But, science apart,
Gergen (1973) pointed out that society, in any
event, changed across time and place, thereby
problematizing in perpetuity all efforts “to build
general laws of social behavior” (p. 316); at any
given point in time, social psychological theory
could never be more than contemporary theory.
The implication was that pure science, with its
canonical focus on timeless universals (which,
when they existed, tended to be of negligible
social significance anyway), had to take a back-
seat to more socially “relevant,” applied, albeit
time-bound research. By focusing on knowl-
edge production itself— each in its own way—
the artifact, ethics, and “relevance” crises raised
troubling questions about the relationship be-
tween psychological science and society.
European Psychology and the “Relevance”
Debate
Contemporaneous with these developments,
a kindred zeitgeist took hold in western Europe.
Inspired by the Frankfurt School’s insistence on
the interestedness of all knowledge, the student
revolution of 1968 fostered a crisis of “rele-
 24 LONG
vance” among European social psychologists
that stood accused of methodological fetishism
(Moscovici, 1972). The discipline had im-
ported, wholesale, the American “social psy-
chology of the nice person” (p. 18), while ideo-
logically inoculating itself against European
social verities. And since the American re-
search agenda was apparently in thrall to eco-
nomic and political stakeholders (see also
Parker, 1989), the implication was that its
European hangers-on had “done no more than
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to operationalize questions and answers
which were imagined elsewhere” (Moscovici,
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1972, pp. 31–32). To make matters worse, the
theoretical impoverishment of European so-
cial psychology—a consequence of positivis-
tic epistemology, aversion for philosophical
speculation, and methodological tensions—
confounded any desire to generate locally “rel-
evant” questions and answers. The outcome was
a “psychology of well-tried aphorisms” (p. 37)
and an associated charge of triviality. In con-
trast to Ring’s (1967) argument, experimental
research was not “irrelevant” because it was
fundamental rather than applied; what made it
“irrelevant” was “due to the social psycholo-
gists having often taken the wrong decision as
to what kind of homo their discipline is con-
cerned with: ‘biological,’ ‘psychological’ or
‘sociopsychological’” (Tajfel, 1972, p. 71). The
triteness of social psychological knowledge de-
rived from an ill-conceived attempt to explain
social phenomena at the level of the individual.
Or, to rephrase Moscovici’s (1972) provocative
question, there was nothing social about social
psychology.
Harré and Secord’s (1972) analogous argu-
ment drew a line under many of the same
themes. The banality of experimental research
in social psychology was a direct conse-
quence of the prevailing behaviorist hege-
mony. The assumption that complex behavior
was the uncomplicated aggregate of simple
behaviors rendered the laboratory experiment
simultaneously inadequate for understanding
real-world behavior yet suitable for making
sense of “a kind of never-never land of be-
havior” (p. 49). An information-processing
model of human beings, conceptual simple-
mindedness, the confusion of scientific with hu-
man variables, and the “special kind of society”
(p. 46) that was generated by the psychological
laboratory were all implicated in a correspond-
ing loss of “verisimilitude.” Theory and method
were mutually “irrelevant,” a scheme of near
axiomatic proportions that could only be sal-
vaged by a dramaturgical model of behavior at
the center of which stood a capable and con-
scious actor preoccupied with presentation,
monitoring, and control.
“Relevance” in “Third World” Psychology
For newly independent countries in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America, the end of colonialism
had generated a powerful imperative of socio-
economic and technological development that
had taken centuries to accomplish elsewhere.
Systematic planning was required not only to
produce the necessary changes but also to over-
come any attendant resistances—which was to
be achieved by revisiting the core ideals of their
respecting knowledge-making industries. A
shift in the balance was inevitable: “Research
for prestige” needed to be tempered in favor of
“research for policy.” In research circles, “so-
cial applicability” became the new mantra,
counterposing itself winningly against the “im-
morality of irrelevance” (Baumrin, 1970,
quoted in Sinha, 1973, p. 5).
With regard to psychology, it was not long
before the “relevance” crisis gained traction in
the disciplinary hinterland. Beginning in the
mid-1960s and spreading rapidly over the fol-
lowing decade, a sustained critique of both
American and European preeminence emerged
and proliferated among psychology communi-
ties throughout the so-called Third World (Ab-
bott & Durie, 1987; Abdi, 1975; Ardila, 1982;
Ching, 1984; Holdstock, 1979, 1981a;
Khaleefa, 1997; Naidoo & Kagee, 2009; Sinha,
1984). This was less a matter of “relevance”
contradicting itself to become an instance of
Fanonian imitativeness than of inevitable ques-
tions being asked about the “Third World” ap-
plicability of an imported Euro-American
“ready-made intellectual package” (Nandy,
1974, p. 7). Psychologists from “developing”
countries naturally assumed a problem-oriented
approach “so that the data provided through
psychological research [could] be of some use
in dealing with myriads of pressing demands
connected with national development” (Sinha,
1975, p. 10). These critical calls for “relevance”
formed the intellectual starting points for posi-
tive attempts at indigenizing the discipline,
 RETHINKING “RELEVANCE” IN SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHOLOGY
which were as numerous as they were varied,
focusing on “structural” (resource-driven),
“substantive” (content-driven), and “theoretic”
(concept-driven) aspects (Kumar, 1979, pp.
104 –105, quoted in Atal, 2004, pp. 105–106).
In particular, the Indian search for a “macropsy-
chology” (Sinha, 1985) and the transdisci-
plinary outlook of Filipino psychology are illu-
minating examples of substantive and theoretic
indigenization, respectively, while the South
African pursuit of a “relevant” psychology em-
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bodies both facets. Each of these cases is treated
in turn.
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Indigenizing Indian Psychology
During the preindependence years, Indian re-
search in psychology was, at best, imitative of
Euro-American disciplinary trends, a situation
that changed negligibly after independence,
when research topics popular in Western psy-
chology still predominated and related only sec-
ondarily to the demands of Indian society
(Sinha, 1986). In the early 1960s, however, a
discernible problem-oriented stance emerged:
Indian psychologists became increasingly con-
cerned with the practical challenges that accom-
panied the real-world processes of national de-
velopment and social change, and began to
direct their research efforts accordingly. There
was also a growing realization that theories and
methods borrowed from Western sources could
not be applied indiscriminately, such that, by
the mid-1960s, a strident critique of the patent
“foreignness” of Indian psychology propelled
efforts toward indigenization.
In spite of this newfound disciplinary zeal,
the psychology of the mid-1970s was deemed
“not merely imitative and subservient but also
dull and replicative” (Nandy, 1974, p. 5); in an
ironic about-turn, even the call for “relevance”
was considered imitative and therefore
amounted to little more than a “gambit.” At the
turn of the 1980s, there were evident “signs of
growing crisis in [Indian] psychology” (Pareek,
1980, quoted in Sinha, 1986, p. 64). By the
1990s, in spite of a now stronger indigenizing
trend that encouraged the selection of socially
“relevant” research topics and variables, Indian
psychology remained marooned in a “recipient
culture of science” (Nandy, 1974, p. 1) and its
own endemic parochialism. It was not that gains
had not been made at all—rather, it was that
25
many psychologists . . . are finding it difficult to cast
off the microcosmic and individualistic orientation ac-
quired in the West; they are bound by the prevailing
disciplinary ethos, are critical about this [indigenizing]
tendency, and doubt the distinctive identity of psychol-
ogy in India. (Sinha, 1993, p. 40)
Indigenizing Filipino Psychology
Of all the Asian countries, the indigenization
project has proved most successful in the Phil-
ippines (Sinha, 1997). Initially a Spanish colony
for more than 300 years, the Philippines even-
tually achieved independence from the United
States in 1946. By then, psychology—which
had been introduced as a subject at the Univer-
sity of the Philippines in 1908 —was thoroughly
American (Montiel & Teh, 2004). During the
early years of independence, however, Filipino
nationalism was in the ascendancy, and psy-
chologists started directing their attentions to-
ward the study of Filipino national identity and
personality (Lagmay, 1984). By the 1960s, the
general ill-suitedness of American psychology
to the Philippine context was widely acknowl-
edged; what was lacking was a coherent alter-
native (Pe-Pua & Protacio-Marcelino, 2000).
The Philippines was deeply affected by the
worldwide student protests of the late 1960s and
early 1970s (Lagmay, 1984). The lingering im-
perialism of American culture was the common
object of disillusionment; there was a growing
feeling that the primacy of the English language
in education—in psychology, for example—
needed to be challenged by introducing the na-
tional language as a medium of instruction.
Nationwide teach-ins, demonstrations, and vio-
lence culminated in the imposition of martial
law in September 1972. By then, Virgilio En-
riquez had just returned to the country after
completing his PhD in social psychology at
Northwestern University. If anything, his
American education made him even more
Filipino-centered in his teaching and research,
and he set about establishing the Philippine
Psychology Research House. In 1975, he
chaired the First National Conference of Fili-
pino Psychology, where the guiding principles
of Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology)
were officially enunciated (Pe-Pua & Protacio-
Marcelino, 2000). In January 1976, Enriquez
founded the National Association for Filipino
Psychology, which deliberately sought to ex-
pand its membership beyond the discipline,
 26
opening its doors to anthropologists, sociolo-
gists, historians, philosophers, and others be-
sides (Lagmay, 1984).
In the words of Enriquez himself, “psychol-
ogy [was] too important to be left to the
psychologists alone” (Pe-Pua & Protacio-
Marcelino, 2000, p. 54). Sikolohiyang Pilipino
developed into a dynamic site of protest against
“a psychology that perpetuates the colonial sta-
tus of the Filipino mind, the exploitation of the
masses, and the imposition of psychologies de-
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
veloped in industrialized countries” (Church &
Katigbak, 2002, p. 131). In time, it would con-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
stellate itself around four core themes: an un-
derstanding of identity and national conscious-
ness, with a social psychological focus on an
indigenous conceptualization of the psyche; an
awareness of, and involvement in, social issues;
attention to national and ethnic languages and
cultures; and the development of psychological
practices appropriate to the Philippine context
(Enriquez, 1993).
Apartheid Ideology, South African
Psychology, and “Relevance”
In both the Indian and Philippine cases, the
reorientation of knowledge production activities
proceeded on the basis of an explicit juxtaposi-
tioning of the “local” and the “distant.” In apart-
heid South Africa, the conditions were rather
different, with the country still being colonized
not from without but from within. When the
National Party (NP) emerged victorious at the
1948 polls, it had done so by warning a nervous
electorate of an approaching inundation
(oorstroming) of Blacks (O’Meara, 1996, p.
34). The metaphor of an unstoppable Black
deluge—not infrequently tinged with sexual
anxiety— had haunted South African politics
for decades and provided ample justification for
the NP’s defensive brand of apartheid thinking.
With H. F. Verwoerd running the Department of
Native Affairs from the mid-1950s, however, a
Christian National reading of racial segregation
took hold. Apartheid ceased being about
Whites’ annihilatory fears, instead finding val-
idation in God’s will that “the Afrikaner . . .
implement it for the well-being of Black and
white alike” (Moodie, 1975, p. 248). In 1959,
when Verwoerd’s successor, Daan de Wet Nel,
stood before Parliament with the Promotion of
Bantu Self-Government Bill, he articulated in
LONG
full the touchstones of this new apartheid ratio-
nality: first, the existence of an inviolable, God-
given calling for every volk (ethnic group); sec-
ond, the volk’s right to self-preservation; and
third, the suitable development of the volk
through segregation from other ethnic groups
(Moodie, 1975; O’Meara, 1996). Apartheid pol-
icy no longer amounted to the purely “negative”
defense of the White race against degenerative
miscegenation but had a “positive” aspect,
too—the creation of a segregated yet prosperous
and peaceful multiracial society. Being well
aware of the Black Nationalist sentiment sweep-
ing across the continent, Verwoerd—who was
by then prime minister—skillfully advanced a
doctrine of cultural particularity as a political
rationale for the creation of independent ethnic
homelands. In an almost imperceptible change
to the nomenclature, negative apartheid trans-
mogrified into the more positive-sounding “the-
ory of separate development.”
Afrikaner psychologists, in particular, took
the separate development program seriously
and stressed the importance of addressing such
substantive issues as alcoholism, road safety,
family disintegration, the nation’s mental
health, moral decay, and youth criminality (La
Grange, 1962). It was believed that the identi-
fication of gifted children would facilitate
nationwide development on condition that “pro-
vision . . . be made for the discovery and devel-
opment of talents within the different commu-
nities of our population according to the special
needs of the different racial groups” (La
Grange, 1964, p. 12). Indeed, the very existence
of the Whites-only psychological association,
PIRSA, established in 1962, demanded “a
strong motivation toward service of country and
volk, including service toward our fellow citi-
zens in the different racial associations” (La
Grange, 1966, p. 18). Just as clinical psychol-
ogy in the United States had attained promi-
nence because of its engagement with social
(i.e., educational and military) problems, a sim-
ilar pattern was identifiable in the rise of the
profession in South Africa (Hattingh, 1966).
For others, on the other hand, the “relevance”
of South African psychology was still a matter
of contention:
Too much [research] is unrelated to our national needs
and the findings are frequently of such a nature that
they have no meaning for anyone other than the re-
searcher. . . . Research on such a topic as the sexual life
 RETHINKING “RELEVANCE” IN SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHOLOGY
of a scorpion is clearly a waste of manpower, espe-
cially when our country’s many human problems are
taken into account. (Robbertse, 1969, p. 8)
Such invocations of the “nation,” however,
referred commonly to the White population
only—the exclusion of Blacks from the national
life was taken for granted. By contrast, from the
late 1970s, the “Black threat” (swart gevaar)
could no longer be denied. Psychologists started
presenting culturally sensitive formulations of a
“relevant” psychology, seemingly oblivious to
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their implicit endorsement of racial discrimina-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
tion. African civilization was apparently “dom-
inated by right hemispheric consciousness”
(Holdstock, 1979, p. 120): For the Xhosa per-
son, “dreams have great significance” (Büh-
rmann, 1977, p. 465), “auditory hallucinations
are common” (p. 466), while “Xhosa patients
think and talk in a less logical, consequential
and goal-directed way” (p. 465). All things con-
sidered, the problem was that “simply nothing is
being done in psychology to expose our stu-
dents to Africa’s psychological rhythm” (Hold-
stock, 1981a, p. 126) where “there certainly is a
oneness with all things, living and nonliving,
animate and inanimate, not just among the heal-
ers but among all people in Africa” (p. 128).
The African Renaissance, South African
Psychology, and “Relevance”
In post-apartheid South Africa, the “African
Renaissance” movement inaugurated by the
one-time deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, ex-
emplifies the prevailing celebration of all things
local. The idea of a reborn “hopeless continent”
first entered the official parlance of the ruling
African National Congress (ANC) in 1997 and
was followed, in quick succession, by an Afri-
can Renaissance conference in 1998, the estab-
lishment of the African Renaissance Institute in
1999, and the launch of the South African
Chapter of the African Renaissance in 2000
(Maloka, 2001). In his keynote address at the
conference, Mbeki (1999) quotes from an arti-
cle that appeared the day before in the Sunday
press:
For long our people have suffered untold hardships.
For long our collective destiny has been compromised
by selfish rulers. This conference should not end up
another academic talk-shop irrelevant to the needs of
the common man. We want practical solutions to our
problems. This is our chance. (p. xiii)
27
Mbeki (1999) aligns himself with the writer’s
“spirit of impatience” and confirms his belief
that the conference participants, “by convening
as you have, you have taken all of us an impor-
tant step forward toward the realization of our
common goal of the renewal of our continent”
(p. xiii). He hopes for a
new African world which the African renaissance
seeks to build . . . one of democracy, peace and stabil-
ity, sustainable development and a better life for the
people, nonracism and nonsexism, equality among the
nations, and a just and democratic system of interna-
tional governance.” (p. xviii)
Mbeki calls for the restoration of African
pride, lost through centuries of “contempt for
the color black. What this means is that we must
recall everything that is good and inspiring in
our past” (pp. xx–xxi). It is, moreover, “the
enormous brain power” (p. xxi) of Africa that
must secure the new century for the continent.
The African Renaissance is in the first in-
stance an anti-imperialist project (Maloka,
2001): It represents at once a postcolonial, pan-
African protest against global domination and
an academy-inspired commitment to locally
generated, socially “relevant” solutions. Even
so, critics point out that it is unclear who the
keepers of the African Renaissance really are:
Does it belong to the continent, the ANC, the
Pan Africanist Congress, or the Union Build-
ings in Pretoria (Maloka, 2001)? Some are
skeptical of its European parallels, others liken
its thoroughgoing discourse of reified difference
to the divide-and-rule strategy of the apartheid
regime, while others still—such as the former
president’s brother— decry it as “a triumphalist
syndrome that afflicts newly liberated African
countries” (M. Mbeki, 1998, p. 213, quoted in
Maloka, 2001, p. 2). The political currency of
Africanization is hard to miss, its ethnophilo-
sophical inclinations urging a wistful return to
“traditional African practices and beliefs”
(Maloka, 2001, p. 4). The now much-bandied-
about feel-good term, ubuntu, which stresses
the virtues of the communal life, has become
the trade name for a free-source computer op-
erating system. A Zulu impi bussed in from the
nearest township can put on a spectacle for
appreciative Versace-clad tourists in air-
conditioned designer shopping malls. The late
South African health minister, Manto Tshabalala-
Msimang, attempts to treat AIDS patients with a
vegetable cocktail (specifically garlic, beetroot,
 28 LONG
lemons, and African potatoes), believing that
“we cannot use Western models of protocols for
research and development” (BBC News, 2008).
For Comaroff and Comaroff (2009), what these
self-conscious, stage-managed performances
of culture instantiate, is a commodification of
ethnicity.
The situation is hardly much different in psy-
chology, where the search for an “African” per-
spective continues to loom large in the struggle
for theoretic “relevance” (Holdstock, 2000;
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Mkhize, 2004). As in the past, latter-day artic-
ulations of cultural essentialism are welcomed
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
without much protest—presumably because
they, too, corroborate a hegemonic political or-
der. Black thinkers, including the likes of Aimé
Césaire, Leopold Senghor, and John Mbiti, are
routinely lionized in the course of hackneyed
arguments about the cultural uniqueness of the
continent and its potential as a fountainhead of
indigenous psychological theory. A supposedly
African weltanschauung provides the intellec-
tual justification for this new psychology:
Counterposed to an equally monolithic Western
tradition, African metaphysics is described as
past- and present-oriented, encouraging harmo-
nious relationships of all kinds, emphasizing the
processual nature of personhood and presuming
a sociocentric definition of self (Mkhize, 2004).
Animating this quest for an African psychology
is a desire to reclaim and reassert an inferiorized
past, necessitating, in Fanonian terms, the re-
nunciation of inner whiteness and the venera-
tion of one’s “own revolting ugliness” (Fanon,
2008, p. 154). It is believed, furthermore, that a
“relevant” South African psychology should
immerse itself in the substantive issues facing
the nation—such as “race” and racism, HIV/
AIDS, and poverty (Ahmed & Pillay, 2004;
Macleod, 2004).
The Academy, the New Mode of Knowledge
Production, and “Relevance”
Despite the populist rhetoric—“The people
shall govern!”—Mbeki has never managed to
shake the public’s impression of him as a
tweed-wearing (Gevisser, 2007), pipe-smoking
“black Englishman” (F. van Zyl Slabbert, per-
sonal communication, November 21, 2006,
quoted in Butler, 2007, p. 271). His conspicu-
ous nonidentification with “the people” mirrors
the impossibility of his appeal for a socially
responsive intelligentsia. Much of the existing
intellectual class was constituted through the
prism of oppressive power formations with the
result that, Black or White, regardless of one’s
imagined class solidarity, to “make” faculty in-
volves successful negotiation of
a force field that imposes its specific determinations
upon all those who enter it. Thus, she who wants to
succeed as a scientist has no choice but to acquire the
minimal scientific capital required and to abide by the
mores and regulations enforced by the scientific milieu
of that time and place. (Wacquant, 2008, p. 268, orig-
inal emphasis)
While a socially conditioned habitus can
have some bearing on one’s idiosyncratic up-
take of that capital, the field constrains the range
of positions that may realistically be adopted in
any given discipline.
In the case of psychology, this much is clear
from Stevens’s (2001, p. 51) description of a
“double bind” that overtakes Black South Afri-
can trainees in professional psychology, forcing
an impossible choice between the foreign val-
ues of the discipline and the familiar ones of
their communities of origin. For Callaghan
(2005, p. 143), South African student psychol-
ogists “dis-identify with activist subject posi-
tions because of the explicit and implicit cen-
sure of such identities in the discourse of
professionalisation that is characteristic of psy-
chological practice.” This assumes, of course,
that candidates with strong political views have
not already been “selected out” of training pro-
grams (Callaghan, 2005, p. 143), since the “au-
thority to speak” demands the foregoing of all
other subject positions (p. 145).
Intrinsic to academic life is a struggle be-
tween “temporally dominated” disciplines—
that is, the “hard” sciences and the “soft” hu-
manities (Bourdieu, 1988, 2001)—a conflict
well known to psychologists, almost all of
whom will have experienced, at some time, the
unremitting “horizontal” tension between basic
and applied psychology. In South Africa,
whereas in years gone by when the basic sci-
ence enjoyed the lion’s share of both academic
and intellectual capital, since the last decade of
apartheid rule, the applied science’s standing
has risen significantly amid insistent appeals for
socially responsive research. In time, the “rele-
vance” factor has morphed into a strategic tool,
by means of which socially privileged rival
groupings compete for access to academic and
 RETHINKING “RELEVANCE” IN SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHOLOGY
intellectual capital. This typically involves the
tacit claim of representing faithfully the inter-
ests of marginalized constituencies, despite the
considerable difficulties of doing so (Spivak,
1988). Whatever confessions of bias are made,
they are usually of token significance only, ap-
proximating to little more than the postmodern
penchant for “narcissistic”—rather than rigorous
“scientific”—reflexivity (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 281).
What Etzkowitz (e.g., 2001) calls a “second
academic revolution”—and D. Cooper (2011, p.
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28) dubs a “second academic transformation”—
which began in the 1970s and took off in the
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
1980s, was, theoretically, a search for “rele-
vant” knowledge (Hessels & Van Lente, 2008).
In practice, it was realized by universities
through the adoption of a third, industry-driven
mission—societal development—that comple-
mented the first two missions of teaching and
research. Beginning in the United States, an
academic revolution, predicated on the capital-
ization of knowledge, spread throughout the
world. In Thatcherite Britain, for example,
the universities, long suspected by Conservatives of
being incubators of socialism, were particular targets.
They, too, were told to become entrepreneurial. Aca-
demics were to be useful members of the society,
contributing directly to the national goal of wealth-
creation. The government, which finances the main
funding councils of research, has made it clear that
research, which aids the nation’s profitability, should
be given priority.. . . Entrepreneurial professors are the
order of the day. Academics compete to obtain re-
search contracts. Funding is not sought in order to do
research, but research is done in order to get funding.
(Billig, 1996, p. 8)
At the revolutionary core lay new criteria for
the legitimacy of science that had varied histor-
ically from neutrality to rationality to innova-
tion (Hessels et al., 2009). Over the centuries,
society had served as science’s benefactor for
different reasons—it now demanded “rele-
vance,” be it “practical applications of research
outcomes . . . the sociocultural value of im-
proved understanding of the world or the pro-
vision of a breeding ground for highly educated
members of society” (Hessels et al., 2009, p.
388). Known variously as Mode 2 (Gibbons et
al., 1994), finalization science (Böhme, van den
Daele, Hohlfeld, Krohn, & Schäfer, 1983), stra-
tegic research (Irvine & Martin, 1984), aca-
demic capitalism (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997),
postnormal science (Funtowicz & Ravetz,
1994), postacademic science (Ziman, 2000),
29
and the triple helix (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff,
1997), these variegated theorizations of the new
knowledge production regime emphasize the
contemporary significance of interinstitutional
synergism.
The actual import of this development re-
mains disputed. A critical reading—advanced in
this article—is that the student-driven move-
ments of the 1960s, produced under conditions
of social alienation, were assimilated into a re-
invigorated “spirit of capitalism” (Pestre, 2003,
p. 252). Reminiscent of Benda’s (2007) treason-
ous intellectuals and Marcuse’s (1965) repres-
sive tolerance, “engaged scholarship”— known
otherwise as “social responsiveness”— has been
operationalized in such a manner as to encour-
age its antithetical commodification as a series
of color-coded signposts on the long and wind-
ing road to tenure.
In their work on academic capitalism,
Slaughter and Leslie (1997) assign a central role
to globalizing forces in the changing complex-
ion of intellectual labor since the 1970s. A
combination of declining public funding of uni-
versities and the escalating requirements of
postindustrial technoscience society has
brought about a proliferation on campuses of
both “marketlike behaviors” (tuition fees, en-
dowment funds, university–industry collabora-
tions, and so on) and out-and-out “market
behaviors” (patenting activities, spin-off com-
panies, for-profit arrangements with bookstores,
and the like). They warn against the dangers of
state-promoted academic capitalism, remarking
that, while academic entrepreneurs function to
some extent within contexts of application, their
reasons for doing so are hardly altruistic. In its
founding rationale, professionalism valorized
service and selflessness and “turned on the prac-
titioner eschewing market rewards in return for
a monopoly of practice” (Slaughter & Leslie,
1997, p. 4). All this changed when, in the latter
half of the 20th century, professors started en-
tering the marketplace (Slaughter & Rhoades,
1990, cited in Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). The
university-specific dispensation that had previ-
ously inserted faculty into a space somewhere
between capital and labor was now more likely
to be withdrawn, as the academic practitioner—
the archetypal, all-credentialing professional—
came to resemble all other laborers. Ziman
(2000) further remarks that funding expertise
has taken precedence over academic distinction.
 30 LONG
State patronage has inexorably led to the politi-
cization and bureaucratization of science, while
the latter’s progressive industrialization has left
it vulnerable to an instrumentalist corporatism.
Although a new mode of knowledge production
has been inaugurated, abiding continuities with
traditional science have created the impression
that nothing much has changed— hence, “the
undramatic character of this cultural revolution
that has concealed it even from those of us who
have lived through it” (Ziman, 2000, p. 69).
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For its part, the South African academy, in
the wake of both the lifting of the academic
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
boycott of the apartheid years and its cooption
into the African Renaissance project, has
proven no less vulnerable to these international
changes. “Relevance” has become subsequently
little more than a buzzword for project funding
and mission statements. Apropos of psychol-
ogy, the discipline remains mired in a neoliberal
moment: Faithful to the cause of a now global
capitalism, “‘relevance’ today is more closely
linked to the discourse of marketing than that of
politics” (Painter & van Ommen, 2008, p. 441).
This has inevitably led to questions—in South
Africa and, indeed, elsewhere—about the com-
mitment of mental health professionals to building
inclusive societies, leaving some to wonder
whether it is all a case of “rhetoric” (Freeman,
1991, p. 141) and “political correctness” (Pillay &
Siyothula, 2008, p. 734) being pulled along on a
“bandwagon [of] slogans” (Adair, 1992, n.p.,
quoted in Church & Katigbak, 2002, p. 139).
Conclusion
The essential tension in debates about “rel-
evance” concerns the relationship between
science and wider society. This article has
described how social upheaval can inspire
intellectuals, in general, and psychologists, in
particular, to pay closer attention to the sci-
ence–society dialectic. It further contends that
the latter-day conception of “relevance” has
abandoned, to a significant degree—and per-
haps unwittingly—its early radicalism and has
been absorbed by a new dispensation that com-
modifies knowledge.
The question of “origins” is a complicated
one. This article has not attempted to locate the
roots of “relevance” discourse in psychology,
but instead has focused on how talk of “rele-
vance” insinuated itself throughout the disci-
pline from the turmoil of the 1960s onward. An
interesting argument is that a history of “rele-
vance” in psychology is in some ways unnec-
essary, coinciding with the history of the disci-
pline itself. Jahoda (1973) noted, some years
ago, that the issues psychology is traditionally
accused of neglecting (he mentioned race rela-
tions, violence, and environmental degradation)
are “mainly accompaniments or consequences
of rapid social change” (p. 466). Psychological
theories are therefore inherently presumed to lack
“relevance,” precipitating “some talk of a crisis”
(Jahoda, 1973, p. 466). He claims that, because the
discipline’s research methods were elaborated on
the assumption that the individual—rather than
broader social arrangements—was its apposite
subject, psychology from the very outset was ren-
dered incapable of theorizing change. Having ap-
propriated its methods from the natural sciences,
the discipline became ensnared in the quagmire of
ahistoricity— hence its trouble convincing newly
independent countries (most of whose challenges
were social-developmental) of its “relevance”
credentials.
Concerning the call for “relevance” in South
African psychology, three cautionary notes
emerge. First, a cursory knowledge of the work-
ings of today’s academy suggests that “rele-
vance” has become a red herring of sorts: It has
long been recognized that the natural subver-
siveness of intellectuals has been overtaken by
“technical, applied social service functions”
(Sampson, 1970, p. 2), the inevitable conse-
quence of living in an increasingly administered
society where students function as little more
than human inputs for the machineries of grad-
uate schools and industry. Second, the ongoing
demand for cultural “relevance” undermines, to
some extent, the prospect of a nonracial society
and perpetuates the same false consciousness
propagated by “positive” apartheid theory. And
third, to imagine the very existence of a “rele-
vant” psychology, one must presume that Spi-
vak’s subaltern can speak after all—and if that
is possible, whether it makes any difference in
the end:
For me, the question “Who should speak?” is less
crucial than “Who will listen?” “I will speak for myself
as a Third World person” is an important position for
political mobilization today. But the real demand is
that, when I speak from that position, I should be
listened to seriously; not with that kind of benevolent
imperialism . . . (Spivak, 1990, pp. 59 – 60)
 RETHINKING “RELEVANCE” IN SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHOLOGY
Neutralized by a corporate takeover, covert
racism, and a false empathy, the idiom of “rel-
evance” has outlived its usefulness.
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Received December 5, 2011
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Accepted July 6, 2012 䡲

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