26th Congress: Invited Panel: “I am not African because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me”: Psychology and the Pan-African Project

Shose Kessi is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town; Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology; and co-director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa. She has published on the psychology of racism in higher education and decolonial and pan-African approaches to psychology.

Divine Fuh is a social anthropologist at the University of Cape Town and Director of HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town. His research is focused on the politics of suffering and smiling, particularly how people find ways of smiling in the midst of their suffering; as well as the political economy of Pan African knowledge production and publishing; and the ethical life of AI. He has undertaken research in Cameroon, Botswana, South Africa and Senegal.

Anthea M. Lesch is a researcher, scholar, activist and lecturer. She currently works as Senior Lecturer in the Psychology Department at Stellenbosch University. Dr Lesch’s primary research interest is in exploring lived experiences of poverty and social inequality, and the ways in which structural inequalities impact the health and well-being of vulnerable and marginalised communities. She is particularly interested in interrogating societal narratives and representations of vulnerable and marginalised groups.

Seth Oppong, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana. He is also a Research Associate of the Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand. He is viewed by many as a thinker and a theoretician in psychology in Africa. His research interests include cultural, historical, philosophical, and theoretical (CHPT) domains of psychology as well as applied psychology, public psychology, and African psychology.