ABSTRACT
In certain respects, corporatised universities could be compared to the owner of a mamlambo, who enters into a pact with this being believing that it will work its magic for his or her benefit, only to fall under its control. As a result of the wealth that it offers and in its sexually irresistible qualities, the mamlambo arouses desires that cannot be readily satisfied and ensnares its human victims by this means. The figure of the mamlambo symbolises the perils and temptations of an economic system that is sustained by the suffering of many in order to benefit a few. In the current academic climate, one inhales the miasma arising from the sequence of sacrifices that form an integral part of the worship of the corporate divinities. The Comaroffs depict menacing occult presences such as the mamlambo as "modernity's prototypical malcontents", symbolically associated with the disillusion and despair generated by forms of Westernised modernity, including "perceptions of money and markets".
