A psychobiography of Oliver Reginald Tambo from an African psychology perspective

Abstract

The objective of this study was to psychologically reconstruct the life of Oliver Reginald Tambo (1917-1993), using integrated African-centred psychological approaches. The researchers applied a constructivist, single-case psychobiographical approach and Alexander’s (1988) principal identifiers of salience to analyse primary and secondary biographical data available on Tambo’s life. From these analyses, we characterise Tambo’s life to reflect the following influential values: (i) God and the humaneness of the traditional African (grounded within the macro-cosmos); (ii) ubuntu in the view of human nature (as part of the micro-cosmos); as well as (iii) Christianity that permeated all aspects of his everyday life from a young age. We conclude that a profound sense of humanity guided and influenced Tambo’s sense of being throughout his life.

Keywords:

• African National Congress
• African psychology
• Oliver Reginald Tambo
• psychobiography
• single-case study
• South Africa

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new statistical data was created or analysed in this study.