JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT (1943-2018) The novelist Justin Cartwright (BA 1965) died in London in December 2018. His parents were newspaper editor and nonfiction writer Paddy Cartwright and Nancy Cartwright. After matriculating at Bishops in Cape Town, he spent a year in the US as an American Field Service scholar before enrolling at Wits to major in French and Political Science. According to his brother Tim, “It was here he first emerged as a writer, producing amusing lampoons on student life and politics. He had a host of friends and, if the reports are accurate,
was always good at a party.” He went on to take a PPE at Oxford, where he also played rugby and polo. After graduating he went into the advertising business in London. His novels included Masai Dreaming, set in Kenya, White Lightning and most recently Up Against the Night, set in South Africa. In Every Face I Meet was shortlisted for a Man Booker award in 1995 and The Promise of Happiness was a bestseller. He leaves his wife Penny and two sons.
Sources: Tim Cartwright; The Bookseller; The New York Times
SYLVIA WEIR (1925-2018) Dr Sylvia Weir (BSc Hons 1946, MBBCh 1950) was an accomplished researcher in artificial intelligence and education, a physician and an activist who strove to advance equality of opportunity. She was the daughter of Rachel and Abraham Leiman and grew up in Benoni. At Wits she was one of very few women studying medicine at the time. After graduating she went to live in the UK, married Donald Weir (a researcher in immunology) in 1956 and had three children. She started working at Edinburgh University in the 1960s as a medical statistics researcher and undertook research in that University’s Department of Artificial Intelligence until 1978. She was already known
for her work using LOGO (a computer programming language) with autistic children when fellow Wits graduate and pioneer Seymour Papert (BA 1950, PhD 1953, DEng honoris causa 2016) recruited her to join him at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was also known for her work on visual perception in the field of artificial intelligence. Her work focused on how computers and robotics could help in the education of children with disabilities. From 1988 until about 1996 she worked for TERC, an NGO dedicated to research to improve
maths and science education in the US. After retirement she moved to Polokwane in Limpopo to help set up the Mathematics, Science and Technology Education College (Mastec), a task for which Sylvia Weir Dr Aaron Motsoaledi (now South Africa’s Health Minister) had recruited her. Later she retired to the UK, close to her family. She helped to set up a charity for South African orphans, Friends of Mponegele, which will be continued, and she enjoyed reading, sudoku and playing the cello; she was active in music groups wherever she lived. She leaves her sons David, Phil and Michael and their families.
Sources: Michael Weir, The Guardian
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