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/ 20 January 2008
It is no accident that a meeting held to commemorate the life of Yunus Mahomed was attended by scores of luminaries from the African National Congress and the United Democratic Front (UDF). Current and former Cabinet ministers paid tribute to their comrade, who died of a heart attack on January 6.
The most prolific thinkers are those who provide us with new concepts to think new realities, and Achille Mbembe is one of these. A professor of history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, he is more a philosopher than a political scientist or historian, but his works are the profound revelations they are because he synthesises all three of these with other disciplines.
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/ 6 November 2007
JM Coetzee’s latest protagonist is none other than JM Coetzee, in a disguise constructed to fool no one. But Coetzee is far too clever to become his own hero — the simulation serves complex functions, not all of which are yet apparent. He uses an artifice that serves his purpose better than if he simply delivered his opinions about the world as it was and as it has become, writes Yunus Momoniat.
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/ 17 September 2007
What strange creatures we are, we yawners, a category that extends across species to include, I am told, mammals of many shapes, colours and stripes. How incomprehensible it is to us that we are sometimes taken, possessed even, by a fit of our physiologies, to extend our jaws and exhale with an intensity that animates only the orgasm and laughter.
Renunciation of the worldly does not spirit the mystic out of the realm of human affairs, and the fate of the Sufi obeys this iron law of reality. Even Sufis are embedded in social, political and economic networks that sometimes nudge them into wordly interventions. The origins of Sufism go back to Mohammed and Ali, his cousin, son-in-law and Islam’s first caliph.