Di same knife weh stick goat stick sheep, the proverb Belize keeps forgetting

By Horace Palacio:

Our grandmothers kept a proverb sharp enough to draw blood.

Di same knife weh stick goat, stick sheep.

Say it slowly and picture the butcher’s yard. The goat goes first, and nobody mourns the goat. The goat was trouble. He climbed the fence, ate the garden, butted the children. When the knife came for him, the yard nodded. He had it coming.

But watch what happens next, because this is the whole proverb. The knife does not retire after the goat. The knife gets wiped, sharpened, and returned to the shelf. And the knife has no memory, no loyalty, and no conscience. The next time it comes down from that shelf, it does not check the species of the neck beneath it. The gentle sheep, the favored one, the innocent one, bleeds on the same blade, in the same yard, held by the same hand or the next hand after it.

Our grandmothers were not teaching butchery. They were teaching politics, and power, and the most expensive mistake a citizen can make. Today, let me make the full case for their wisdom, because Belize is a yard full of knives right now, and too many of us are cheering them because of who they are pointed at.

Here is the principle in one sentence. Never judge a power by its first target. Judge it by its permanence.

Because targets change and tools remain. Intentions die with the men who held them, but instruments get inherited. Every dangerous power in history was introduced the same way, aimed at a goat nobody would defend. That is the sales technique. Pick a first victim the crowd dislikes, and the crowd will approve the blade itself. Then wait. The blade always finds new necks.

History signs this proverb in blood. In revolutionary France, Robespierre fed his enemies to the guillotine and the crowds roared, until the morning in 1794 when the cart came for Robespierre himself, and the machine he had sharpened took his own head without a flicker of gratitude. And readers of this column will remember our Sunday on the Council of Nicaea, where an emperor’s power of exile was first used to banish the loser of a church dispute, and everyone approved. Within years, that same instrument banished Athanasius, the winner’s own champion, five separate times as the winds shifted. The knife that stuck Arius stuck Athanasius. It always does.

Now walk our own Belizean yard with me, and count the blades.

Start with one this column dissected months ago, the CEO system. In 2000, one party forged a knife that let the government of the day install its loyalists atop every ministry. Its makers surely imagined it serving their good intentions forever. Then 2008 came, the other party won, and picked up the exact same knife with delight. Twelve years later it changed hands again. Three governments, one blade, and the same victim every single time, the professional public service of Belize. Both tribes cheered when their hand held the handle. Both tribes bled when it passed. Di same knife.

Look at the calls, every time crime surges, for detention without trial, for the strongman’s methods, aimed at the gang boys today. I asked the question once and I ask it again. That knife, once forged, sits on the shelf for whoever wins the next election. Would you trust it in the hands of the party you despise, pointed at a son you love? Because that is precisely where inherited knives end up.

Look at the proposed broadcasting licence for online voices. Some Belizeans quietly cheer it, imagining it muzzling the pages they hate. Understand what you are cheering. A licence that can be denied can be dangled, and the clause does not know your politics. The government that can silence the commentator you despise holds the identical power over the one you trust. You are not approving a target. You are approving a blade.

Look at the whistleblower question. If the officers who leaked the SmartStream records are hunted for embarrassing this administration, the precedent does not expire with this administration. It waits, oiled and ready, for the honest officer who will one day try to expose the next government, perhaps one you oppose with all your heart. Hunt today’s truth-tellers and you have pre-silenced tomorrow’s.

And look at the smallest knife of all, the one in our own hands, the mob. When the pile-on forms against someone you dislike, and you add your stone because this goat deserves it, remember that a mob is a knife with no owner at all. It does not disband after your enemy. It scrolls onward, hungry, and one day it finds a name you love. Perhaps yours.

Why do we keep falling for it? Because tribalism blinds us to tools. We see only targets. Red cheers the knife in red’s hand, blue cheers it in blue’s, and the knife, patient beyond both, simply waits its turn to be inherited. The goat always deserves it. That is what makes the goat useful to the people selling the knife.

So here is the test I ask every Belizean to carry from today, and it takes ten seconds. Before you cheer any new power, any law, any precedent, any crackdown, any mob, perform the knife test. Place the instrument, in your imagination, into the hands of the person or party you most distrust in this world, and aim it at someone you love. If it frightens you then, oppose it now, while it is still pointed at the goat. Because the only moment a knife can be stopped is before it becomes tradition.

Let me be fair before I close, because this is not an argument against all knives. A nation needs blades. Laws, police, courts, these are edged tools, and a country without them is eaten alive. The question is never whether knives exist. It is how they are kept. A good law is a knife in a locked case, with a judge holding the key, due process guarding the lid, and daylight shining on every use. A bad law is a knife left loose on the kitchen table of whoever wins the next election. Everything this column demands, the courts, the transparency, the entrenchment, the oversight, is really just one demand. Lock the cases.

The goat and the sheep in Belize are not strangers, my friends. They are neighbors. They wear red and blue. They swap places every five years. Today’s cheering crowd is tomorrow’s trembling flock, in the same yard, under the same shelf.

Our grandmothers knew it and folded it into seven words of Kriol so we could never claim we were not warned.

Di same knife weh stick goat, stick sheep.

Protect the goat you despise, Belize. His neck and yours share a yard.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.

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