Africa Rising: From Slavery to Freedom – A Psychological Perspective, seeks to highlight the psychological underpinnings of Africa’s and Africans’ mental, emotional, socioeconomic, political, and behavioural woes, while suggesting a clear and original way forward by transcending the latter through recreation of a correspondingly transformed mind-set.

The Atlantic Slave Trade, the Berlin Conference and the Partition of Africa, colonial philosophies and leadership styles had specific mechanisms meant at predicting, conditioning, controlling, and manipulating traditional African worldviews, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, speech, action, consciousness, and behaviors.

The main phases in the psychological manipulation of the African psyche and behaviors include: deception of African senses through ‘worthless sense stimulating and distracting trinkets’, geographical fragmentation of the African continent through the Berlin Conference and the Partition of Africa, destruction of the African traditional spirit, imprisonment of the African soul, and ultimately destruction of the African body.

The specific psychological mechanisms for enslaving Africans were as follows: civilizing mission, Christianizing the ‘savages’, scientific racism, assimilation,  paternalism, ambiguity, ambivalence, reaction formation, perspecticide, creating an identity crisis and an inferiority complex among Africans, dehumanizing and defacing the African image, pejorative appellations of Africans, suppression of African traditional education, among others.

The psychological consequences among African of deception, fragmentation, dissipation, imprisonment, and destruction, are: deterritorialization, feeling homeless, culture shock, uncertainty, ontological insecurity, extrinsic motivation, schizoid symptoms, displacement and projection as defense mechanisms, horizontal split, denial, repression, vertical split acculturative stress, compromised traditional Botho/Ubuntu ideals, chronic negative self-concept, self-image, self-esteem, psychological and sociocultural disorientation, and generation of anti-values.

Additional consequences include: escape syndrome, nihilism, masochism, narcissistic rage, imperfect willpower, self-handicapping, cult of personality, state capture, dynasty takeovers, pseudo-rhetoric, survival ethos, neoliberal consumerism, negative hedonia, and plundering of national resources.

The way forward for Africa and Africans beyond the strictures of psychological slavery entails six phases which are: dissolution, remembrance, separation, conjunction, expansion, and regeneration.

The aforementioned six phases imply the following psychological processes: ego death, de-identification, dissociation, Khotso or communalism, self-determination, intrinsic motivation, mindfulness, self-actualization, self-recollection and re-viewing the transpersonal ideals of African nations, mindfulness, reactivation of positive self-concept, image, and esteem among Africans, self-assertiveness, holistic education, interculturalism, multiculturalism, humanism, self-sacrifice, collectivism, self-reliant interdependence, willingness to serve, and development of autotelic character traits and attitudes.