A WILL FOR THE MACHINE, computerization, automation, and the arts in South Africa

239pp., illus., paperback, First SA Edition, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781997461203

Published in the USA in 2026 by the University of Chicago Press.

Mark Sanders discusses South Africa’s entry into the computer age in the 1960s and 1970s; how it coincided with the apartheid government's view of automation and computerisation as a way of barring black Africans from skilled work, and how this history relates to early twentieth-century struggles around mechanisation in local mining and telephony. He also explores how the arts realise ideas about the ethics and politics of automation by analysing responses to it by writers Miriam Tlali and JM Coetzee and artists William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company.

"In the sea of AI slop, A Will for the Machine is our life raft. Rejecting the hype and generalities that normally encrust discussions of automation, Sanders offers us historical depth and cultural specificity. He nimbly navigates across disciplines, forms, and decades to delineate the ways in which literature and the arts mediate local understandings of technology. Erudite, perceptive, and lively, this book shows what is possible when writing on machines.” Rebecca Roach, University of Birmingham

“Sanders sets out to consider the history of automation in South African society by reading a series of writers’ and art-makers’ works for their engagement with automation per se and its attendant social consequences. Focusing on one national context allows Sanders to point toward larger payoffs for studies of automation and culture more broadly. This is a characteristically ambitious project, executed with sophistication, that will appeal broadly to scholars of race, gender, performance, and visual arts across the Global South." Andrew van der Vlies, Adelaide University

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 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).