Willy Mayom Maker

Eradicate your big ego before your big ego eradicates you!

Many components make your body function effectively. One of these components is ego. Your mind creates ego, whose main function is regulating your behaviors and protecting your identity.

Your ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette, and rules in deciding how to protect your self-image. So, when you interact with other people, your ego monitors the conversations. If someone says nice things about you, your ego sends a positive frequency to your mind, and the mind activates love, joy, amusement, happiness, or other positive emotions. But when someone says nasty things about you, the ego sends a negative frequency to the mind to activate anger, sadness, rage, annoyance, or other negative emotions. Therefore, the ego enables people to achieve a balance between their moral and ideological standards.

We get an idea about our self-importance from ego-generated illusions in mind. These illusions come in the form of positions or possessions: honorable, doctor, professor, general, governor, and other ego-fueled titles, which become a part of our identity. If you call a high-ranking official by his real name, say, Kiir Mayardit, for example, he will be angry because his real name makes him feel belittled and disrespected. You must add these ego-fueled titles to their original names to make them feel highly respected and superior: President Kiir Mayardit, Dr. Riek Machar, or General Wani Iga.

The bigger your ego is, the longer your title can be to feel superior. For example, former Ugandan president Idi Amin's official title was: "His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular."

Although ego enables you to value yourself and your accomplishments, it can be dangerous when you have it in large quantities. If you let your ego takes too much control of yourself, your emotional intelligence plummets, creativity disappears, and you lose touch with reality.

Persons with big egos have exaggerated feelings of self-image, which is often driven by poor self-worth or lack of education. They are so insecure that they compensate by feeling superior, but in reality, they are full of emptiness, untruthfulness, futility, foolishness, and empty pride. These people act how they act because they think they are not good enough.

Ego is not rational; it's impulsive and wants you to think you are superior. That is why people with big egos are fragile and insecure. They become incredibly dependent on external validation, so they crave praise and admiration from their family members, friends, and colleagues. Because your ego craves positive attention, it can make you susceptible to manipulation. Subsequently, you give a brand-new car to a musician who praises you in a song. That's ego, not generosity.

As South Sudanese, our cultures fan the flames of ego. The ego destroys the mind, our ability to learn and adapt, to be flexible to build relationships. While our egos quarantine us in our separate tribal quarters, other societies have gone through agricultural, industrial, and technological revolutions. The ego-free societies can negotiate international trades and treaties in just a few hours. But the ego-centric societies (especially Dinka and Nuer) discuss marriage arrangements for months or even years. Therefore, too much ego prevents progress. It causes a society to stand still—stagnate.

Ego and poverty live together. People don't want to work with their hands to feed their families. If they don't get a job that earns them an ego-fueled title, honorable, they will never work manual work to earn a living and feed their families. An ego-centric individual is like an empty granary: it looks big and promising but won't feed anyone.

Invention or creativity requires a willingness to take risks, experiment, and venture into the unproven territory to pursue great ideas. Those who worked with their hands invented the biggest inventions, such as planes and phones. An English mathematician and physicist discovered Gravity while working on his farm, and an apple fell on his head. But when an inflated ego becomes the norm, society will become inflexible and unwilling to take the small personal risks necessary to break out of your comfort zone and pour yourself fully into your work.

Your worst enemy is your ego. It has chained and cemented you, as shown in the picture below (borrowed online), while the rest of the world is advancing.

Read the Agaar Dinka mythology of creation (copied from the book—THE PROUD PEOPLE; Agaar Dinka):

Since Nhialic was considered the Creator, the sense of the sacred permeated various aspects of the universe and the spirituality mentality affected the way the Agaar viewed the universe. Like any other people who try to make sense of how their world came about, the following is the Agaar mythology of creation.

In the very beginning, there was the Great Master. His name was Maayuäl. Maayuäl lived in heaven where He sat on cushioned clouds and wore twinkly colored beards (stars). Because of this, He was called Nhialic Maayuäl (Heavenly Almighty).

Nhialic Maayuäl created heaven, earth, and all things. The two entities (heaven and earth) were close to one other and held together by a rope. Maayuäl used the rope as a ladder to climb up and down from heaven to check on the people, animals, plants, everything on earth. If people wanted to see Nhialic Maayuäl, they also used the rope to climb up to heaven. Everything was in perfect order.

After creating heaven and earth, Maayuäl took the remnant of the mud left after making the land and fashioned it into a man and a woman: Garang and Abuk, the first couple. He then blew the air inside them through their noses, and they became alive. As a result, the first couple with their descendants became black, beautiful, and majestic, just like Maayuäl Himself.

After creating the first couple and placing them on the land, Maayuäl used a wooden mallet called puööt to beat down the rocks and lumpy ground into fine soil, where Abuk and Garang could live and grow crops and rear cattle. Maayuäl then collected the debris and pushed them away from the Jieng land. The debris formed hills and mountains, which we see today. And this explains why there is no single hill or mountain in the Jiengland; Maayuäl pushed the trash away because He did not want Abuk and Garang to hurt their feet. After all, they were His children, and He loved them.

Maayuäl made it rain so that people and animals could have water. But the rainwater sank deep into the soil, leaving people and animals with nothing to drink. In other words, there were no rivers, lakes, seas, or oceans. Garang and Abuk climbed up the rope to heaven, and they complained to Maayuäl that they needed water.

So Maayuäl came down from heaven and walked towards the rising sun where He uprooted an aguot (papyrus). Water came out of the hole where the aguots were uprooted to form a big pool. Then, He walked towards the setting sun and uprooted an even bigger aguot, creating a bigger pond. The two pools formed Lake Victoria and the Mediterranean Sea, respectively. In the Agarland, Maayuäl uprooted two small aguots to form Lake Akeu and Lake Nyiböör, respectively. While he was walking from east to west, Maayuäl dragged his pronged walking-staff, called kuarang, creating lines, which turned into Ciir or Kiir River (Nile) and its tributaries.

Garang and Abuk had two children, Deng and Benykook. While all other tribes were the descendants of Deng, the Agar people were the progeny of Benykook. Maayuäl blessed Deng and Benykook, and they had many children and grandchildren. These children and grandchildren also had their children and grandchildren, and so on. It didn't take long before they grew into many clans and tribes.

As the population grew, the traffic to heaven increased, because the people climbed up and down regularly using the rope to see Maayuäl. But the cable was blocking a robin's pathway. With many people going up and down the line every day, robin and its family could not fly freely. The robin complained to Benykook to remove the rope. But Benykook could not remove it because it was the only way they could see Maayuäl.

After she complained and nothing was done, the robin became very angry. So she used her beak to cut the rope thread by thread until it finally snapped. Heaven floated up into the sky with Nhialic Maayuäl. That's how heaven and earth were separated. Garang and Abuk, with their children Deng and Benykook, and their grandchildren lost contact with Nhialic Maayuäl.

Benykook built a big luak (shrine) and initiated a sacrifice. People gathered around the altar to sacrifice a white bull. They prayed and sang:

Waa Maayuäl
Yin ee Bἓny dan thɛɛr,
Ɣok aa ruai oyi ee;
Waa Maayuäl yin ee Bἓny dan thɛɛr!
Waa Maayuäl,
Waa atɔ nhial!

Translation:
My father Maayuäl,
You are our Master forever,
We are related to you;
My father, Maayuäl,
You are our old Master!
My Father Maayuäl,
He is in heaven!

Since that day, Nhialiny Maayuäl has not come down from heaven in the flesh because the rope is no longer there. Instead, He comes in the spirit, and He has to communicate with people through intermediaries, such as the jak, the ancestors, and the spear masters, the bitter people and the tit diviners.

To eliminate killing and revenge-killing in our society, let the children "drop the guns and pick up the books". This is the ONLY solution!