Psychology has a chequered past in South Africa. On the one hand, it was used to bolster the apartheid regime’s racializing project, and was silent on the abuses meted out by the state. On the other hand, there was a small, but important, set of psychologists who wrote cogently about how psychology should be practiced in progressive and contextualized ways, and who provided support for people who suffered in opposing apartheid (e.g. detainees).