A question asked in the opening plenary of the 2026 South African Communications Association conference (SACOMM), hosted by the Wits Centre for Journalism, lingered throughout the deliberations. Tanja Bosch, professor of media studies and production at the University of Cape Town and holder of the NRF SARChI Chair in Digital Media Sociology, asked how Africa might get into the rooms where decisions are made and, once in, be heard.
The conference theme, “Asserting the Human in the Time of Technofeudalism: Global South Perspectives”, borrowed the term “technofeudalism” popularised by the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis. The word refers to an order in which Big Tech platforms collect rent from everyone who depends on them, and SACOMM’s organisers set out to address the backdrop of fear and panic around Big Tech’s headlining of AI adoption at scale.
Welcoming us on behalf of the university, Garth Stevens, Wits’ deputy vice-chancellor for people development and culture and professor of psychology, opined that romantic notions of stepping away from our computers are long gone. He invited us to lean into hybridity, actively pursue interactions that undermine binary notions of North and South, and commit to research grounded in ethics, trust, connection and relationality. Finally, he asked us to “look for the North in the South and the South in the North” in our work.
Bosch convened a session titled “After Technofeudalism: Information Integrity, Sovereignty, and the Algorithmic State in African Public Life”, with Herman Wasserman, professor of journalism and chair of the Department of Journalism a Stellenbosch University, and Tshepang Molale, senior lecturer and head of media studies at Wits University. In the spirit of emerging academia, each scholar brought their students along to unpack projects that their departments are working on.
Bosch’s students started making their case in the corridors of the venue, handing out leaflets and badges that declared, “Decolonisation is not a vibe. It’s a method”. It was a nod to the title of Bosch’s 2025 essay in Media, Culture & Society. Their QR codes invited delegates to contribute ideas towards a manifesto for colleagues in the Global North.
Anthea Garman, professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, reminded the room that SACOMM has always called on the academy to take an activist stand against racism, sexism, xenophobia and other malevolent exclusions.
A moment later, Molale offered the sombre sense that our hopes of real inclusion in the bodies that make decisions and policy, in Africa and globally, amount to tokenism at best. Being invited into the room, after all, can still mean being ignored once you are there.
When the call for papers came through earlier in the year, we sensed that SACOMM, long a place where emerging academia flourishes, might be an ideal setting for the Future in the Humanities (FITH) fellows driving Digital Humanities research at Wits’ SA-UK SARChI Chair in the Digital Humanities to offer some live insights drawn from their grappling at the intersection of theory and practice.
Between Bosch’s question and Molale’s scepticism sat eight minutes that somewhat bridged their positions. FITH fellows Karabo Mohapeloa, an MSc candidate in computer science, and Joshua Ward, who recently completed his master’s in English literature and is set to begin a PhD in computer science with the Chair, were under extra-special pressure to deliver meaningfully in their slot.
They had been invited to present to the whole plenary on the work of the Chair’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) and African Knowledge working group, led by Iginio Gagliardone, professor in media studies and holder of the Chair.
Theirs is a simple question with decidedly reluctant answers: to what extent do students at African universities cite African scholars? (Gagliardone sketched the project’s longer-term ambitions on this very Substack in August.)
The group starts with master’s and PhD theses deposited in WIReDSpace, Wits’ online repository of theses and dissertations. Then an open-source tool called GROBID pulls every reference out of each bibliography and into a spreadsheet, before a set of Python scripts, building on PyAlex and PyOrcid, look up each cited author in OpenAlex and ORCID to find where they were based.
The group is alive to the hazards of using institutional affiliation as a working proxy for ‘African knowledge’. For instance, a scholar trained at Wits who now teaches at Oxford, or a European writing about Africa, makes simple counts, well, not a simple matter.
As you might imagine, scraping and sorting thousands of reference lists by hand would take many people many years. Scholars at Wits and elsewhere have done it the hard way before… that is, one thesis at a time. Scripts make the task more manageable, and repeatable. But it still needs people at every step, to check, re-check and apply judgement in weighing what the code returns.
That work has benefited from the involvement of FITH fellow Christine Mataranyika, who is currently enrolled in a PhD in computer science with the Chair. She handled a great deal of the processing that is taking the project to scale, but also co-leads the group’s manual annotation.
The first pass through theses from Wits’ Faculty of Humanities already tells a story. Of the more than 9,000 peer-reviewed sources cited, the large majority trace back to Europe and North America, overwhelmingly to the United Kingdom and the United States.
It also points to ‘African knowledge’, as Wits students cite it, being predominantly South African. Earlier studies of South African theses (using different measures) point in a similar direction. It’s a lineage we’ll be referencing in a future piece. Meanwhile, theories are forming to establish the nature of these dynamics and unpack them.
One of those theories concerns citations that couldn’t be matched to any author at all. The team can’t yet determine with certainty whether they belong to African scholars nobody cited or to African scholars the databases simply can’t find. It seems fair to suggest, though, that some of the rooms African scholars struggle to enter are made of metadata.
The archive also raises questions of its own. Thesis records thin out the further back one goes, and the team is keen to explore why with the custodians of the repositories, whom we hope to welcome to the Chair’s inaugural hackathon-style sprint, from 23 to 26 November, which aims to generate methods that can be shared beyond the Wits pilot, to other universities in South Africa, in Africa, and eventually, wherever they might be handily deployed.
The answers that surface are unlikely to be purely technical. Why gaps like these open, and why they persist, matters as much as (if not more than) the code written to work around them. This work is not happening in isolation, mind.
Wits Libraries launched the Wits Open Data Vault in 2025 to preserve and share the university’s research data, and in March Lazarus Matizirofa, associate director for research scholarly communication and digital systems at Wits Libraries, joined the global advisory group of Digital Humanities Now, with a brief to raise the visibility of African scholarship.
Further afield, the Africa Charter, co-created by bodies including the Association of African Universities, the African Research Universities Alliance and CODESRIA, is pressing for fairer terms in research collaboration between Africa and the Global North. Our ETD project, built with colleagues at the University of Helsinki’s Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities, is just one strand of that wider effort.
What comes next is slower and more human. Through October, FITH fellows have been annotating theses by hand, row by row, to build a standard against which the scripts can be judged. If the manual and computational counts line up, the group can trust its numbers at scale. If they diverge, the differences will show where the tools, or the repositories, are falling short.
Then the aspiration is for the lens to widen to faculties beyond the Humanities, back through three decades of theses to the transition to democracy and the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests, and eventually beyond English and beyond Wits. If citation patterns shifted after those movements, that might well say something about their reach and impact.
Elsewhere across the three days at SACOMM, papers took on AI plagiarism in university classrooms, the effectiveness of university AI policies, and what machine learning means for journalism, marketing, podcasts, poetry, environmental education and reality television, to name just some. The view was undeniably weighted towards doubt and trepidation about the future of the human in all this.
Our fellows were among those trying to reassert the human in that equation. Their contribution, while modest, at least offered a tactile means of quantifying (counting, checking, re-checking) and critically analysing what the count leaves out about getting into spaces of influence, and why.
There’s no overstating what it will actually take for African scholarship to influence global agendas. It takes deliberate choices about what we read, publish, fund and build on… choices that aren’t (necessarily) made or determined by spreadsheet. Even so, it should at least help to arrive at those choices with clarity about whom we cite, whom we’ve been missing and which doors have stayed jammed for the Global South.
We’ll be sharing more granular insights on our ETD project in due course. Do subscribe so you don’t miss a thing.
