Reckoning with inheritance: Decolonising group analysis through Afrikan knowledge systems

This essay explores what it might mean to decolonise group analysis through an encounter with Afrikan knowledge systems, written from the position of an implicated subject – a white Afrikaner psychotherapist, living in Europe, reckoning with complicity and loss. Weaving theoretical critique with clinical and community vignettes, it considers how decolonial thought reshapes analytic practice.The essay begins by situating group analysis within its European origins and the structures of coloniality, drawing on Fanon, Spivak, and Santos to highlight the silences and exclusions that persist in analytic discourse. It then turns to Afrikan epistemologies as generative resources: ubuntu reorients recognition as collective responsibility; sankofa reframes silence as a site of return rather than resistance. These dynamics are illustrated through a therapy group’s struggle with the misrecognition of a trans woman, and through reconciliation dialogues between elders and youth in a community scarred by violence.Finally, the essay considers implications for training and institutions, emphasising reflexivity, an expanded clinical frame, and a pedagogy willing to linger with paradox, opacity (Glissant’s right not to be fully transparent), and discomfort. Group analysis, renewed through Afrikan thought, is framed not as resolution but as an unfinished praxis of becoming-with others.