On a clear day, the beauty of [Mogadishu] is visible from various vantage points, its landscape breathtaking. Even so, I am aware of its unparalleled wartorn decrepitude: almost every structure is pockmarked by bullets, and many homes are on their sides, falling in on themselves.

From the roof of any tall building you can see the Bakara market, the epicentre of resistance during the recent Ethiopian occupation; its labyrinthine redoubts remain the operations center of the militant Islamist group Shabab. Down the hill are the partly destroyed turrets of the five-star Uruba Hotal, no longer open. Now you are within a stroll of Hamar Weyne and Shangani, two of the city's most ancient neighbourhoods, where there used to be markets for gold and tamarind in the days when Mogadishu boasted a cosmopolitan community unlike any other in this part of Africa.

So what do I see when I am in Mogadishu? I see the city of old, where I lived as a young man. Then I superimpose the city's peaceful past on the present crass realities, in which the city has become unrecognizable.

Foucault is fallible … A thinker, a fortiori Michel Foucault, is not there to tell you what to think. He is there to provoke you into thinking. Thinking which is both with and against the thinker. Reading a thinker like Foucault you therefore owe a responsibility to your own thought as well as to that of the thinker. Fallibility therefore allows you to derive something additional from Foucault, something more than being confined to some canonisation of his thought. For one thing, it compels you to think a little more for yourself.