Date:
Thursday 16 April 2026
Time:
13:00 – 15:00
Venue:
Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
(enter via Regent St)
Speakers:
Mark Sanders and Aidan Erasmus
A Conversation in the Humanities in Session Series at the Centre for Humanities Research, part of the Advanced Research Seminar.
In A Will for the Machine: Computerization, Automation, and the Arts in South Africa,, Mark Sanders outlines South Africa’s entry into the computer age in the 1960s and 1970s and explains how it coincided with apartheid’s zenith. The government viewed automation and computerisation as one way of barring black Africans from skilled work and reserving it for whites. Sanders unpacks this peculiar history, relates it to early twentieth-century struggles around mechanisation in local mining and telephony, and analyses responses by the writers Miriam Tlali and JM Coetzee, as well as the artists William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company. Showing how the arts realise ideas about the ethics and politics of automation, Sanders contributes to debates about locally divergent understandings of computer technology and human–computer interaction.
Mark Sanders is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at New York University and Extraordinary Professor of Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University. He is the author of A Will for the Machine: Computerization, automation, and the arts in South Africa (2026), Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa (2019), Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (2007) and Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (2002).