“Welcome to the Rational Circle,” Nyagoa said. She held the mic firmly in her hand. “It’s been a while. We’re here today to talk, well, rationally, about things we feel need to be said.”
Applause followed.
Everything was fake. The way we sat, laughed and shared pleasantries was all clearly rehearsed. The room felt awkward.
“I’ll cut to the chase,” she continued. “As many of you have read in the Juba Monitor, the Rational Circle was declared defunct. ‘Too many brilliant people in one group,’ they said. We are now split into the Liberals and the Culture Faction. In our last online meeting, we agreed it was time to address this face to face, with openness and intellectual honesty.”
She avoided saying that things didn’t fall apart because of ideas, but because of attacks, which were personal, ugly, and public.
Maker, Monday, and Laat said that Ayen and I only supported liberalism to justify our shameful history of personal “shortcomings” abroad. Maker accused Ayen of “whoredom.” That she slept with every Tom, Jack and Harry on the streets of London. That no South Sudanese man could ever satisfy her again, thanks to her overstimulation.
These were all published on the blog Speak Your Mind, run by Laat. It was a platform known for unfiltered content, mostly hate speech and defamation. Its motto is “Absolute liberty of conscience, thought, and expression.”
That same blog was where Ayen, Majok, and I had posted long, scathing responses to retaliate against Laat, Maker, and Monday. One excerpt read:
“Laat is a puppet of his parents. His timidity and lack of identity have been mistaken for virtue. He avoids drugs not out of discipline, but out of primitivism, despite the wealth around him…”
“Who’s Maker? The dumbest member of the Rational Circle, without question. His being in the “Rational” Circle defeats the whole point. His writing is flat, his thoughts are mediocre, and his pride in small achievements reveals just how low his bar is. What takes him a week to grasp, Ayen gets in a day…”
“Poverty has messed with Monday’s head. He sides with the least capable people in the Circle because he’s financially strapped. I don’t hate the kid—he’s a victim of circumstance. But if he came to our side, we’d help him grow…”
These articles went viral, and the Circle descended into chaos. So, in an online meeting where everyone was around twenty minutes, we agreed to meet at the Imperial Hotel to discuss everything face to face once and for all.
___***___
When I started The Rational Circle, the first person I told was Maker, and he immediately agreed without asking a single question. I knew he would agree promptly because he had that desperate hunger not for knowledge itself, but for the appearance of having it. He wished, more than anything, to seem learned; to be, if not brilliant, then at least believed brilliant. Unfortunately, he was neither. His getting into engineering school, and involvement in intellectual discussions, his oft-photographed appearance beside books he did not quite read, had often given people on social media the impression that he was brilliant.
He wasn’t.
He couldn’t have gotten into engineering school if it weren’t for his father, His Excellency, Vice President Martin Majier Makuei, who secretly drove him into the Dean’s office one day and facilitated his admission. We were already friends then, close enough to tell each other things that would be offensive if they came from a stranger. I told him, for instance, that he was an academic conman because he didn’t earn his place into engineering school. I told him a few other things and he took them gracefully.
He introduced me to his father, and told him that I was his closest friend, and that I had a positive influence on him. His father thanked me for helping his son at school after his rehab. Yes. He was addicted to methamphetamine, also known as ice in Juba.
Maker followed through his acceptance to join the Rational Circle and contributed his $5000, and so did Ayen, Laat, Majok and Monday.
___***___
Ayen was the darling daughter of the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, a man who had mastered the art of appearing competent while doing very little. She belonged to the class of those rich modern women who, having spent a significant portion of their young lives in less-than-admirable pursuits, return home and attempt to remake themselves into entirely different specimens. Her stay in the UK had been a thorn in her father’s side. She was sent there to study finance and economics at a business school in London. But she had instead built an unwholesome reputation for herself. Among the South Sudanese in London, she became known as The Head Girl because of her amazing head game. Her father learned about this and had her brought back to the country, stripped of her privileges, and re-enrolled in the University of Juba, School of Economics, so he could keep a proper eye on her.
She sank into depression after that, likely from being suddenly made ordinary and from shame of her reputation.
I first met her at the university cafeteria, when Majok, Laat and I went to grab something to eat after our lectures. It was like any other day: students ranting loudly over each other about who was initiated before who, whose clan had a better origin and so on and so on.
Majok was talking about how his dad was making it difficult for him to do this semester’s holiday in Greece. “He said he doesn’t want me to be on my own. ‘I can’t leave you to your own devices this time,’ he said with that annoying tone and facial expression. He wants me to do the holy day with the family in Dubai. But there is no real experience with that.”
His dad is the minister of road and bridges. When Majok whined about how his dad dictated his traveling choices, and he whined about that a lot, I always said in my head that for a father who loved traveling with his family so much, Mr. Minister should know the value of roads and bridges and actually work to construct them.
“All they do is eat the same Arab foods every night, take pictures of buildings, go up the Burj Khalifa and sit through endless Arabic concerts. Ugh!”
“It isn’t that bad, man. Chill. Do you know how many South Sudanese in this university pray they visit Nairobi or Kampala? You are privileged and you should be grateful.” said Laat.
“Says the good kid who goes wherever he wants,” Majok said while curling his fingers around “good kid.”
Laat was, in many ways, the anomaly in the Rational Circle. He had never touched drugs or experienced being drunk in a club. Being the son of Ezekiel Wani, the governor of the central bank, and Sarah Nyikong, the Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, he had lived in silken comfort, but he was surprisingly not spoilt.
His mother once told him to consider the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “It will be a prestigious step for a boy with your grades and temperament for academics,” her mother had said in a polished British accent. “Don’t worry about the admission process,” she waved her hand in the air, “I have enough diplomatic connections to cover that.”
“No mom,” Laat protested respectfully, “I want to study at the University of Juba so I can understand the situation of my people and the country.”
I would later laugh at this reason because the people he hung out with don’t give the lessons he needs: children of vice presidents, ministers and other high government officials who drive exotic cars to expensive resorts and talk about the next holiday destination: Rome, Dubai, Tokyo, Bali; or about the food and the weather; the cars and expensive jewelry, in foreign accents.
“If I wanted to know my people,” I had told him one afternoon, “I would sit with the children of SPLA veterans who now sell charcoal in the markets. I would drink from the same cup as the daughters of widows who brew siko to survive. I would walk with the hawkers at Nyakuron and Customs. They are the average citizens.”
At the cafeteria, I ordered a chicken sandwich and avocado smoothie. Majok ordered a lavish American breakfast of scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, toasted bread with peanut butter, harh browns and a glass of orange juice. Laat ordered chapatti and smokie, and African tea. I gave him the look. I always give it to him when he does something so obviously performative. How exactly does ordering the most common and cheapest breakfast in the cafeteria make you humble? It doesn’t help any poor person. Actually, helping the poor help the poor. I told the circle that if they really wanted to make a difference, they should start by talking to their fathers to change their corrupt ways. And they laughed, telling me if I wanted them kicked out the same way my father did to me.
My father kicked me out of the house a year or so ago. After all, he is the Honorable Emmanuel Magook, the minister of cabinet affairs and a close friend of His Excellency Gatluak Ruaichar, the President of the Republic of South Sudan. He chased me out of the house because I had been constantly telling him that they had no idea about what the people of South Sudan were going through.
“You’ll not manage anything I’m doing here because your mind is infested with all the moral bullshit you feed yourself on the internet. Politics is about politics. Nothing else! Even service delivery is politics. No politician delivers service because they want to serve; they deliver service because they want to climb the political ladder. Even in America where you came from, that’s how it works. You wouldn’t know because you were just a drunk there. And if you ever lecture me again about what’s right and wrong, I’ll throw you out of this house!”
I remember him throwing his hands in the air. He coughed loudly and for so long as I watched his stomach dance inside his vest and the soft lights reflected from his smooth, bald head.
Then I heard my mother running downstairs, shouting that one day I would kill my father. She’s a member of parliament, and I was always straight with her that her being in parliament was clear proof of the incompetence of the entire government. She tried to slap me, but I just moved slightly enough for her to miss and she would breathe heavily in frustration afterwards.
We were still talking about Laat’s performative choice of breakfast when I noticed a girl. She was in some expensive gray baggy jeans, white long-sleeve shirt, and a midnight blue sweater beautifully thrown over it. She had a midnight blue baseball hat on, too, and her natural hair flowed over her neck. She had no makeup on. Just some gloss on her soft lips. Her dark and smooth skin was sun-kissed by the natural light coming into the cafeteria through the windows. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life.
She glanced in my direction with white almond-shaped eyes, and I just kept staring. She had now seen me staring at her and she stared back for a moment before she shook her head slightly and went back to stirring her smoothie with the straw. “I’ll be right back,” I pat Laat and Majok on their backs and went to sit near her.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi,” she replied softly.
“My name is Makur Magook. What’s yours?”
“Ayen.”
“Ayen who?”
“Can’t that just be enough?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why do we need to attach our father’s name to ours in order to be complete?”
“I mean, there are so many people who share the same names.”
“Is that the real reason?”
“I mean… unless they’re hiding something from me?”
She laughed softly. “You’ve spent much of your life in the States, and I’m sure you have been to the UK. How do they introduce themselves?”
“Well, often it’s just one name. Sometimes two.”
“And they have names that are common there too, right.”
“Yeah, they do.”
She gave me the look that said I’ve made my point.
I was stunned by how she weaved that argument together. Beautiful and smart. Now that was rare.
“Wait,” I said, leaning closer. “How did you know I was in the States?”
She chuckled. “Well, who doesn’t know you? The Rational Circle? You, Laat, Majok and Monday?”
“Nah, you can’t be serious.”
“I mean, people around here kinda know stuff. You know, they do their homework.”
“So, you know me personally?”
“It’s not that I know you personally,” she said, waving her hands, “I just know that you’re the son of the Minister of Cabinet Affairs. You lived in the States. You came back. Blah blah blah.”
“What do they say is the reason I came back?”
“Do you really care about that?”
“No… Actually, I don’t.”
There was an awkward silence. She made noise sucking her straw.
“Do you need another drink? I mean—”
“No, I’m good. I’m good,” she said, shaking her head excessively.
More silence.
“So… what does your father do?”
“Why does that matter?”
“It doesn’t. I just want to know.”
“I don’t really care what he does.”
“Do you have a problem with your father or…?”
“I don’t— You know what? I’m gon— I need to leave.”
“No, no,” I said quickly, catching her by the arm. I stared into her radiant eyes. “I didn’t mean to weird you out or anything. Sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
She calmed down and went back down.
“It’s just that I don’t like talking about him that much.”
“It’s alright,” I said.
Silence.
“I would want you to join the Rational Circle. We want every smart person we can get right now.”
“I’m not that smart,” she smiled.
My God. Her teeth were white and perfectly shaped inside her healthy black gums.
“What do you mean? You are. I can tell a smart person when I meet one.”
She seemed to be thinking while playing with her straw. The drink was already finished.
“Sure, why not,” she said finally.
“Then let me introduce you to the rest.”
After she met Majok and Laat, we walked slowly around the campus. We talked about one thing or the other. We arrived at the Rational Circle office. It was not really an office. Just a quiet room in one of the older buildings on campus with mismatched chairs, stacks of philosophy books, and a corkboard of clippings and ideas. Ayen was surprised by how serious it all was.
___***___
Ayen fit flawlessly in the Rational Circle with an aura so natural that it seemed she had always been a part of it. She spoke to me frequently about how her poetry had made little progress with the various editors to whom she submitted it. She had sent it to lofty magazines such as the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, but was never accepted. She was getting the same reply: that her work didn’t fit their magazine, and that she should keep writing; maybe someday she’d write something that’d fit.
“They think my style is old fashioned. Now I submit to small magazines that people only find through Facebook links that I and my friends share,” she said. “They have neither traffic nor reputation. I feel like a fraud when I say my work has been ‘published by a magazine.’”
I told her that poetry, in the modern age, lay largely lifeless. Nobody wrote like Robert Frost, Charles Bukowski… anymore. The abstractions had made it easy to celebrate bullshit nobody even understood.
“Poetry is not meant to be a riddle,” I told her with some warmth. “It is the expression of feeling. But now, when a poem is hard to understand, sometimes due to incoherence, people conclude it must be brilliant.”
She laughed and said, “Not funny.”
She came to my apartment once in a while, but she never let me go to her house. Since she returned from London, she had made sure she was never seen with a man.
She told me about how difficult life had been for her since she returned from London. She told me about her depression and how her therapist, an old woman who had no sense of modern troubles, told her to take a deep breath and understand what she was feeling.
“Understand what I was feeling?” She had asked “Feelings wouldn’t be such a burden if they could be understood so simply.”
We made love once and many more times after that.
___***___
Monday had shown brilliance, though he failed to impress the most rational minds of the Rational Circle. But he was impressive overall. He wrote fiction and plays, and sometimes research papers on different topics. His fiction was much better than that of Laat. His characters were alive, reasonable, flawed and proactive.
His father was the former commissioner of Lakes State but now, he did nothing related to the government because he had fallen out of the president’s favor. Laat, who was a staunch advocate of Machiavellianism, constantly told his father that virtue was a political weakness and that he was operating in the old ways when corruption and political cunning had not reached their current heights. Now it was those who evolved with the game who survived modern politics.
The old man ran a small pharmacy, but it was not enough to sustain the life that Monday and his family had once known during his father’s time in power.
When I first met Monday, he used to order the cheapest food on the menu. When I asked him why, he said it didn’t feel right eating expensive meals he couldn’t afford. I told him that ordering cheap food wouldn’t change his circumstances. He took it in good faith, and ordered whatever he liked from then on.
___***___
The Imperial Hotel rose like a mirage amid the dust and hum of Juba. For those who rarely went there, it was a strange palace wrapped in clean lines and luxury. It had a blue swimming pool surrounded by a lawn.
Under wide umbrellas, pale and still as sails waiting for wind, white men lounged with black women at their sides while holding tall glasses filled with bright cocktails. South Sudanese who walked past the fence, stealing glances between the rails, often said these foreigners felt no excitement here. This paradise looked no different from their homes back in Europe or America.
In the pool, old men and women with stretched bellies floated and splashed beside young lovers. These were people who had reached the end of desire too early, and now dragged memory back through the arms of the age mates of their children who reminded them, dimly, of their vanished youth.
Inside the hotel, it was soothing to listen to the slow South Sudanese music playing. Ayen and I sat at one of the guest tables with Laat, Monday, and Maker. The master of ceremonies was Nyegoa, a bestselling novelist, a member of the Rational Circle, and a Juba Monitor headline regular with three books under her belt.
She grasped the mic and stood with the aura of a Nuer queen and the confidence of Beyoncé. Her gown flowed gently over her toes, and beads twinkled across her forehead and neck. Her eyes were majestic. She was tall and curvy.
We were exchanging cold glances at each other. It was clear no one came here to be honest. We came to win.
+++++
Nyegoa called on Maker to speak. As usual, he had nothing to say. He rambled—trying to sound smart—but said little of substance. Then he sat back down, visibly angry.
Monday and Laat followed. At least they were coherent. They argued that culture is the bedrock of society—especially one as diverse as South Sudan. Liberals like Ayen, Majok, and me, they said, wanted to tear that foundation down.
Monday raised his voice: “Look at America and England—your models of progress. Over there, a waitress can’t even call a man ‘sir’ without asking about pronouns because it’s offensive to call what clearly looks like a man a man. That’s not progress; it’s confusion. And feminism? Equality? Look at the statistics—women are more anxious, more depressed, and unhappier than ever before. Doesn’t that tell you something? If independence makes women miserable, isn’t nature trying to tell us that men and women are not meant to be independent of each other? Culture is not the problem—it’s the root. We can tweak it, modernize it, but it’s still culture.”
He went on to rant about how even “modern” life—nine-to-five jobs, schools, universities—were all forms of culture.
Ayen, Majok, and I rose to respond, one after the other. We argued that while culture could be reshaped, the basis of our thinking was reason, science, and trial-and-error—not superstition or tradition for its own sake.
We asked: if a practice doesn’t harm a person, their neighbor, or society—why oppose it? Why oppose homosexuality, for instance, when it’s a personal preference that harms no one?
It was smooth when each speaker called forward spoke without interruption until Maker cleared his throat while Nyagoa was summarizing what we all said to the new arrivals. “This is pointless,” he said with his hands spread. “You think this dinner will undo the public insults? The lies? Ayen tried to destroy me. You think I’ll pretend we’re colleagues again?”
“You destroyed yourself the moment you used my past as argument,” Ayen shouted. “What you said wasn’t critique. It was slut-shaming. Shame on you, Maker! Shame on you!”
“Let’s not spiral—” Laat gestured with his hands for everyone to calm down.
“No, Laat,” Ayen barked. “Let’s spiral. That’s why we’re here. To finally stop pretending we’re civil.”
“And whose fault is that?” Monday asked. “The Liberals posted those ugly attacks on Speak Your Mind.”
I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. “So did the Culture. You started it with that piece on Ayen’s ‘whoredom’—”
“Which was true,” Maker interjected.
“—and then accused me of only believing in liberty to excuse my ‘shortcomings’ abroad. Basically, you said I support liberal ideas because I was a drug addict, and used to have threesomes with lesbians and bisexual women.”
There was silence for a moment. We were just staring at each other, standing with arms pressing on the table and lips quivering in anger.
Majok, who hadn’t said much since the beginning, stood slowly while biting his lower lip, looking at all of us, shaking his head. “This isn’t what the Circle was for. It was meant to be a place where we were honest, where ideas had room to breathe, where power would finally be used fairly, where civility would finally be exercised. Not where we tore each other apart because we were bored.”
“Bored?” Ayen laughed bitterly. “I was suicidal for a month. That’s not boredom. That’s me not being proud of my time in London. That’s me trying to forget all that I was when I was there. Just as I thought I had forgotten and finally healed, then these, you, you…” Ayen exploded in tears.
The room froze. Maker pounded the floor with his feet while scratching his head.
Nyegoa reached for Ayen’s shoulder.
“Don’t. None of you defended me when that trash was published. And now you want to talk rationally?”
There was long silence.
“She’s right,” said Laat finally. “We all let the Rational Circle become a place for ego. Even I, by keeping that blog up, I let it fester.”
“You profited from it,” Ayen said. “Speak Your Mind got funding because of the drama.”
“Yeah. It did. And I’m sorry.”
Maker and Monday cast a disappointing look at Laat.
“The truth is,” I said, “this circle was built on illusions. Illusions of brilliance, virtue, growth. And when we started losing control of those illusions, we turned to character assassination to feel superior again.”
“Then let’s shut the shit down. Nobody is going to go back to normal again after all this,” Nyegoa said angrily
“No,” Ayen shook her head. “As Makur said, we were just being delusional when we started. Now that we have said all this, we will finally stay honest with ourselves (which is really important) and with each other. I say we stay.”
There was silence. The guests were watching from a distance the scene of the conflict.
Monday nodded first. Then Majok. Laat followed, then Nyegoa. Maker, disappointed, said, “Fine.”
It was late in the night. The city was going to sleep. We broke off and went our separate ways.
====
Image: Aron Yigin Unsplash