The First Stone
An Argument - MET - Chapter 54
Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.
John Vorster, Former Prime Minister of South Africa - South African Year Book, 1977
Odyous of olde been comparisonis, And of comparisonis engendyrd is haterede.
John Lydgate, Debate between the horse, goose, and sheep, circa 1440
The argument that engendyrd so much haterede between the horse, the goose and the sheep started, in this particular case, when the sheep asserted that South “Failed-State” Africa lacked the moral authority and the civil credentials to accuse Israel of anything, let alone to assert to the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Israel had demonstrated a “pattern of genocidal conduct” since launching its war in Gaza, a patch of land half the size of QwaQwa, the homeland designated during the golden days of apartheid to be the one and only legitimate home of a branch of the Sotho people who identified themselves more or less as Kwakwas. Sort of.
“There’s a beautiful symmetry about it,” mused the horse. “The inventors of apartheid accusing them of stealing it by force.”
“The comparison is odious,” said the black-faced sheep.
“Set a thief to catch a thief,” said the goose with a lipsticked beak.
The sheep was furious.
“How can you even talk?” it said. “Just look at us, for fuck’s sake. The sheer, unmitigated, hypocritical nerve of it. Never mind the corruption, the crime, the greed, the total collapse of infrastructure, the dire state of education, the shocking socioeconomic legacy of apartheid and, insanely, that we can’t even turn the fucking lights on in 2024. Apart from which, or maybe because of it, we’ve got one of the highest murder rates in the world — 36.4 for every 100,000 people, beaten only by places like El Salvador, Belize, Jamaica, Honduras and, yes, even Lesotho.”
“Unless you count Gaza,” said the horse, nostrils flaring.
He does some quick equine calculations behind his blinkers. “Which is now approaching a murder rate of, uh, 3,333 per hundred thousand people. Just to be fair.”
“That’s just a just war,” said the sheep. “It doesn’t count.”
The horse swallowed a munchful of frog-green kikuyu. “What’s a just or unjust war if it isn’t people killing each other?”
The goose reflected. “What could an unjust war look like if it didn’t look like this one…”
“Who threw the first stone?” asked the sheep, woolly-warm with ire.
Answer came there none. But the goose couldn’t help noticing a neurolinguistic twitch in the wether’s right bright emerald eye.
They stared at the white and black clouds swelling over the distant Drakensberg. It looked like hail.
“Who, then,” ventured the goose, “of all the great and not so great countries of the world, has the moral authority to throw the first stone at this one now?”
“It depends on what you call a country.”
“It depends on how far you go back in history.”
“It depends on if there will be any stones still standing.”
“It depends on your race, your religion, your politics and your principles.”
They asked ChatGPT, which had none of them.
“Antarctica,” it said.
“That’s not a country,” said the horse.
“No one lives there,” said the goose.
“Your question is made more complicated by the condition that it must be inhabited by people,” said ChatGPT.
It had the annoying habit of speaking in italics.
“No,” said the sheep. “It’s got to be a country where everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”
“Rwanda?”
The horse laughed like a horse.
“You can laugh. But Rwanda has now been officially and judicially defined by the Mother of all Parliaments as one of the safest places on earth,” declared the sheep.
“True fact.”
The goose laughed like the horse. “Guilty until proven innocent.”
It took a little while for ChatGPT to find a country that hadn’t been complicit in one form of genocide or another.
“Vanuatu, then,” it said at last. “It’s a little less guilty than Greenland.”
“Vanuatu, then,” said the sheep.
“They would have invaded us if they could have after we stole their flag,” said the goose.
“But nobody knows that history,” said the horse.
“Nobody knows how anybody knows anything,” said ChatGPT.
“You’ve got to know enough to care,” said the sheep.
“You’ve got to care enough to want to know,” said the horse.
“You’ve got to know enough to know how much more you need to know before you can actually know what to care about,” said the goose.
“You never know…”
It didn’t sound like a statement of fact.
They stared at their various feet. Each of them had deeply personal reasons to despise their fellow creatures.
After a pause of twenty or thirty nanoseconds ChatGPT burped again, this time with a map:
“So maybe QwaQwa.”
“It isn’t a state.”
“It isn’t even a country.”
“But it got fucked over by everyone and fucked over no one.”
“Because it doesn’t have any plunderable natural resources.”
“That’s the point of a one state solution.”
“What?”
“You can, like, share stuff with your neighbours...?”
The horse laughed like the sheep. “It’s got plenty of stones.”
“Good example.”
The goose felt oddly vindicated but uttered not a murmur. She was watching neveq on Instagram.
ChatGPT coughed a little cough. “Ironically irrelevant footnote,” it announced. “Kwa-kwa in the local variant of the Sesotho language means ‘whiter than white’.”
The sheep puked up a small, round pebble. It rolled back and forth in flecks of blood between the devil and the deep blue sea.
An app beeped on the goose’s Chinese phone. Eskomsepoes was announcing Stage 99 loadshedding for the next thirty-seven years.
“Dark people,” said the dark horse.
The hail came.
To make sense is to make enemies.
Ambrose Moke, The Redactions
Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.
Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza