A Will for the Machine: Computerization, Automation, and the Arts in South Africa (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226844619)

This study takes up the relations among computerization, labor, and the arts in South Africa.

There are many books about the history and discourses of computerization in the United States but relatively little about these phenomena anywhere in the Global South. In A Will for the Machine, Mark Sanders outlines South Africa's entry into the computer age in the 1960s and '70s and explains how it coincided with the high point of apartheid. South Africa's government viewed automation and computerization 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 mechanization in mining and telephony in South Africa, and analyzes responses to it by the writers Miriam Tlali (1933

Author: Mark Sanders
ISBN-10: 0226844617
ISBN-13: 9780226844619
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 12/26/2025
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback