Intellectual and political separatism have propagated two ideas deeply damaging to psychology in the developing countries, and in Africa in particular. One is that the working class of the developing countries — the poor, the ill-educated, and the rural — inhabit a third world that is at a lower evolutionary level than the glittering first world of psychologists and other professionals. The second is that until an indigenous third world (or African) psychology has been developed, psychology and its practitioners will remain irrelevant to the people and problems of the developing countries. In this article the author argues that both the world and psychology are unitary, and that this one psychology is indeed relevant to the developing countries, and that psychology's curriculum in these settings can be enriched not by ‘relevance’, but by human welfare applications derived from psychology as it now exists.
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