Goats In High Places: Sheepcraft. A Short Story.

GBORBOMA—A goat and his great family occupied a beautiful land in Gborboma. Gborboma translates, “Goat World.” The land was so beautiful that any food crop planted there grew in just a month. Any seed of tree germinated, grew, flourished and bloomed in just a year. Everything grew in Gborboma. Nothing could afford not to grow there. The Ancestors of the goats were so intelligent that they devised various sustainable technologies and philosophies in Gborboma in order to keep a goat-grazing balance with nature, Mother Earth (Asase Yaa). Every goat could graze only as much as he needed to remain alive and to keep his goat-grazing balance with nature. Goats could not graze how they wanted or how they pleased. Including the kings and queens of goats! This system was called Ma’at.

As a result goats managed good goat-grazing, which was guided and guarded by the carefully crafted philosophies of Ma’at. Goats had managed to live in Gborboma for millennia and the land remained untainted. Ma’at was a philosophy rooted in the fine art of restraint. And the land had become so rich that even under the rich soils where one would expect to find solid rocks, there was gold. Only gold. It was as if all the rocks had metamorphosed into gold over millennia in constant praise of Gborboma’s sustainable ways of living in balance with nature.

One day, Gborboma was visited by strange looking goats from far, far away. These goats were very different. They were sheep, actually. The sheep had arrived in Gborboma by accident.

Where the sheep came from—in Sheepwich—the land was like a desert. Every living thing in Sheepwich struggled to grow, let alone live. It was as if some violent and backward earlier tribe of sheep had intentionally poured sea salt, or some other arsine, on all the land, for the fun of it, to stop things from actually growing. Where the sheep came from, around Sheepwich, such violent acts on Mother Earth were not uncommon. In fact, the sheep themselves had become so enamored of their own violence that they sought newer and newer places, of sheep, upon which to enact more and more violence. The sheep would stray far away from home, not even caring about returning home. Sheep remained in constant search for the thrill of violence on nature itself. Once a place had been destroyed, there was no use to return there. There was nothing home to return to as a result of sheep-violence. No place was home. Every place was home. Sheep were globalists.

Gold was a rarity in Sheepwich and around Sheepwich. Anyone who had gold could essentially own the lands of Sheepwich. And they did. The kings and queens of Sheepwich had gold, and no one else had any. The kings and queens of Sheepwich owned all the lands and they taxed all other sheep for being born on the land. Every sheep paid a life tax. When a sheep failed to pay, he was slaughtered to keep the balance between the kings and queens and their sheeple, the masses. That is to say that in Sheepwich, they had developed all kinds of technologies and philosophies to keep a unique balance of power between the capitalists and their laboring masses. Not between sheep and nature, but between the kings and their sheeple-masses. This system had different names, but at the time the sheep accidentally found Gborboma, the idea among all sheep was called capitalism.

Sheep-violence, which was carefully guided and guarded by the kingly principles of capitalism, left most of Sheepwich like a desert. Almost all resources on the land had been spent through gluttonous consumption. Every sheep, who could take anything through violence, took whatever it needed and whatever it wanted from the land. There was no restraint. Capitalism was a system of zero restraint. Hence, even food had difficulty growing and the rocks underneath the devastated soils of constant sheep-farming, remained just rocks, stones, in constant defiance of the terrorism visited upon them by sheep-violence.

Instead of mending their ways to live in harmony with their habitats, sheep were more concerned with the Philosophies of More (POMs). Capitalism was what they called just one of such several types of philosophy. There were many. And sheep were obsessed with Philosophies of More. They loved that each of these Philosophies of More came along with sheep-violence, the first love of all sheep. The penchant to eat and then shit where one lived was the first love of sheep. The proclivity to drink and piss into the same pot was what made sheep tick. This is why sheep must loiter and roam to find ever more serene habitats to fuck up! No place was home. Every place was home. Globalists.

This is how sheep got to Gborboma, where the ancestors of goats had kept the lands, the seas and the rivers serene and just free of sheep-violence.

However, goats had become oblivious to the nature of sheep-violence and the many different philosophies of sheep group think. Goats were unaware of the Philosophies of More. They were unaware of sheep philosophy.

More insidious, goats had become unlike their ancestors. They had stopped reading and writing about what they knew and how they had come to know what it is they knew. They had stopped writing about themselves, about their ancestors and analyzing their enemies. Goats had stopped reading and writing about their Gods, their friends and their strangers. Goats had abandoned the fine arts of their ancestors’ intelligence: Writing. Goats had allowed Oral Culture to seep into their own temples, which were the places of higher learning, and self-and-spiritual enlightenment. Goats had become unaware that knowledge was not achieved or conveyed over the generations through oral culture but through a written culture. Goats had abandoned and forgotten the preponderance of their stupendously diverse writing systems of their immediate past. They had become unaware that without a writing system their own children would invite strange and dangerous enemies into their midst. Goats had become unaware that a nation without writing was already dead.

When reincarnated scholars from the goat-past arrived and preached about the need for goats to turn away from oral culture, go back and fetch writing systems from their past (Sankofa) in order to educate the next generation to be literate in their own languages, other goats (the elite goats, the Metha goats), most of whom had received sheep-education at home and/or abroad laughed. The metha goats mocked the scholars of the past and their wisdom. The metha goats rather adopted their enemies’ languages, their enemies writing systems without actually knowing that they had abandoned their own music and opted to play their enemies drums and pipes. The metha goats (the more educated than his ancestors goats) loved their enemies without actually knowing that they loved not themselves but their enemies. The metha goats wanted to become just like their enemies; just like the strangers at their throats. They would rather help their enemies to suffocate them, kill them, than fight back. Of course the metha goats were not actually aware that their love for sheep culture for example, was the death of their own, the death of goat-dom.

As a result of the preponderance of oral culture and its pervasive and insidious effects, goats had become unaware of their own philosophy. Goats had become ignorant of Ma’at. So, as much as goats practiced Ma’at, and as long as sheep-violence was nowhere present in Gborboma, most goats were by and large happy and Mother Earth was kept safe.

The arrival of sheep in Gborboma would however change everything. Every single thing that Gborboma knew! And with the sheep came sheep-violence, sheep philosophy, the Philosophies of More. Sheep had destroyed their own habitats and were looking for new ones to destroy. Sheep were restless, and because they were restless they were without a philosophy of restraint. Sheep no longer needed the whole Earth. The whole Earth was not enough! Sheep needed Mars, they need the Moon… and on and on and on. By the time sheep were done with complete colonization and subjugation of Gborboma, they would need more than eleven new Earths in order to continue in their gluttonous consumption for the foreseeable centuries. Even then sheep would remain restless, unrestrained, and destructive and above all, savage!

Goats were unaware of this. Goats no longer wrote or read in their own languages. Goats had become unaware that the people of Ma’at needed to contend with a new danger: The reality that caved sheep were often a restless herd, a destructive herd, a savage herd. Goats had become unaware that sheep were in Gborboma for one thing and one thing alone. To kill and to destroy, by any means. Goats were unaware that their contentment, a remarkable attribute of Ma’at, was different and also stood in contradistinction from the restlessness of sheep. Goats knew through ritual practice, inherited from their intelligent ancestors that in order to become self-sustaining, in order to reach God, Godliness, Ma’at, the man must reach a stage of total contentment. Goats however mistook restlessness on the other hand, a remarkable attribute of the devil, to be a form of contentment, a form of wealth. As a result goats were unaware that the restless could only loot, rape and destroy. Goats were unaware that in the end, the restless would destroy their new habitats in Gborboma.

For instance, the sheep had managed to convince the goats about the gold in Gborboma. The sheep wanted to buy the gold in Gborboma soils. Gborboma decided to sell the gold. The goats really didn’t need sheep money. What to do with sheep money? Buy food in Gborboma, or build a house in Gborboma with it? Goats could do all that without sheep money before the arrival of sheep. So, the sheep gave the goats a letter (a piece of paper with words on it, calling it a promissory note) and convinced the goats that the paper had so much value. How would the goats know? They neither wrote nor read. The sheep claimed that the value of the paper was equivalent to the value of gold. The goats accepted. In fact, the sheep claimed later that the value of one sheet of paper (the size of a warrior’s palm) was ten times the value of a pot of gold. Goats accepted. In fact, the sheep claimed later that the value of the paper was one hundred times the value of the same pot of gold. Goats accepted, not without being a bit skeptical. Of course how can the goats verify? They neither wrote nor read in their own languages, anymore!

So the sheep would excavate the gold in Gborboma, transport it to Sheepwich, have it turned into jewels to be sold in other parts of the world including Gborboma. To sell the jewels in Gborboma, the sheep did not accept paper from goats in the way that goats accepted paper from sheep. The sheep only accepted more gold for their jewels. The goats would pay in more gold to enjoy sheep-jewelry. Of course, some of the thinking goats asked if the sheep would accept the same paper in return. The promissory note. The sheep did not refuse their promissory note, knowing that refusing it would alert any goat intelligence left of sheep restlessness. In order to conceal sheep restlessness, the sheep then claimed that a cup of sheep-jewelry was worth a thousand times the value of pot of gold.

First a single note was worth a hundred pots of gold. Now the goats needed a thousand of those notes (one hundred thousand pots of gold) to buy a cup of jewelry from the sheep. More and more pots of gold needed to be dug for the sheep, to pay for sheep-jewelry. The goats would dig, and dig, and dig for more and more gold. In fact the sheep were happy to help the goats dig for more and more gold, for free! The goats did so much digging that there were no longer farmlands left in Gborboma. The soil had become useless with gold digging chemicals. With little food to eat, the goats would buy food from the sheep. The goats needed more and more gold to pay for the food, the toiletries, the furniture, the oil, the clothes, and even their own water. All goat waters, rivers and lakes had been polluted with gold digging sheep chemicals. Of course, the thinking goats, especially the ones with big heads, thought of this affair between goats and sheep as trade (a term they had learned to regurgitate from sheep books in sheep schools).

On and on the sheep, and their philosophy of more, went and this is how sheep continued to devastate Gborboma. Sustainable Goat-grazing had been lost. Ma’at was forgotten. The goats were not aware of this cunning devastation however. Those goats who knew a little jokingly called the sheep cunning dogs (Ayevu), amazed at how the sheep had enriched themselves in such a short time. Of course sheep were not dogs, but their cunning and trickery of this thing that other goats called “trade” was intriguing to those goats who knew just a little. One thing was sure: The sheep would destroy the planet, the Earth (Asase Yaa), by any means necessary, if even by the art of trickery. A new philosophy of more, a new philosophy of sheep-violence then emerged among the sheep in colonized Gborboma: Witchcraft, or better yet, Sheepcraft. With Sheepcraft, which only worked when goats refuse to return to their own past (of written culture, not oral culture), the sheep were sure to completely colonize, thoroughly loot and totally destroy Gborboma, together with the whole planet that came with it. And whose fault was it? The low intelligence of goats in high places!