Mindanao's Turbulent Past
©1998 Karl Aanonsen

The following is an attempt to give a brief account of the historical events that took place in Mindanao with special emphasis on the events that had impact on the Tbolis and their tribal neighbors. It is my intention to show how the happenings far from the Tbolis' homeland had repercussions that shaped their lives. Starting with a broad discussion, covering the vast area comprising the former Province of Cotabato, the account increasingly converges to cover only the upper part of the Alah Valley.

        Historically, five external powers had an tremendous impact on the life of the indigenous peoples of southern Mindanao, each in their own way. These were Spain, the USA, Japan, the Philippines ^(*), and Islam. The latter was very influential, though it created a political power on Mindanao rather than being one in itself. Some of these powers were so overwhelming that they created new realities to which people had to relate, and within which they had to seek new opportunities. Yet they did not impact with equal strength simultaneously all over the southern part of Mindanao. While people living on the plane fertile areas near the coast were immediately affected, those living far up in the valleys did not even notice some of them. But even though they were able to adhere much longer to the "slash and burn-" techniques, they were indirectly affected by all these external powers through their neighbors' change of life style. Thus, the impact that people experienced was neither equally distributed in space and time, nor was the development that people went through homogeneous. These conditions provide the basis for the dynamics of change that took place on Mindanao.

* In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Philippines was not a nation in the same sense as today. Although claimed by the Spaniards, a large part of Mindanao was de facto not part of the Philippines.

The Spaniards and Mindanao

In 1521 Magellan, a Portuguese in the service of the Spanish king, landed on the small island of Lapu-Lapu, adjacent to Cebu island in the Visayas. He claimed the land for the Spanish Crown, but was killed a month later by a local chief. By 1542 Spain and Portugal had come to an agreement on the apportionment of the island groups of eastern Southeast Asia. The Spanish share was named Philippines, after Emperor Charles V's son Philip. Spain sent several expeditions to the archipelago without really succeeding. However, under the command of Miguel Lopez de Legaspi, the Spaniards accomplished a permanent occupation of the islands in 1564. Spain had three main objectives in colonizing the Philippines: to gain a share in the spice trade; to pave the way for the continued Christian missionary efforts in China and Japan; and to christianize the Filipinos. It succeeded only in the third respect, and then only partly.

        Apart from among the Moslems of Mindanao and Sulu, the Spanish met little organized political power. Armed resistance was on the local plane, i.e. the barangays, relatively small kinship groups. Partly due to Moro resistance and partly due to rivalries with Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands, the Spaniards never managed to conquer the whole of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, nor did they establish effective political control. By the middle of the seventeenth century Maguindanao and Sulu had welded into centralized sultanates with claims to international status. They put the Spaniards on the defensive to the extent that the latter had to leave their settlements in Formosa in order to concentrate on the threat from Mindanao. Not until late in the nineteenth century, with the help of steamships and modern arms, was the looting of the Christian towns and settlements in the Visayas halted, and some control could be exercised on Mindanao.

        The Spaniards had, of course, a tremendous impact in Luzon and Visayas. On Mindanao this was limited to the northern coastal areas including their hinterland valleys, Zamboanga City, and, to some extent, also in the Provinces of Davao and Cotabato towards the end of their era. However, they had an indirect impact on the events taking place in the south of Cotabato, particularly their battles with the Moros.

The rise and decline of the Magindanàû

The Magindanàû live at present along the coastal area of Southern Mindanao, as well as in the Cotabato Basin adjacent to the upper Alah Valley. Their place of origin is said to be a stretch upriver of the Pulangi River outlet, approximately where Cotabato City is located at present. As is the case with other Mindanao peoples, they were once horticulturists, hunters and gatherers; their tools being mainly wooden. Their expansion started about 1475 when the Malaysian Sharif Kabungsuwan from Johore arrived at the mouth of the Pulangi River, probably accompanied by a small force of Samal warriors. The tribes living adjacent to the mouth of the river were hostile towards Kabungsuwan from the beginning. The Magindanàû, however, submitted to Kabungsuwan and converted to Islam. He, in turn, married a daughter of a Magindanàû chief and became their leader. It is said the Magindanàû were originally inferior in number compared to the other adjacent tribes. But, due to their superior arms, among them swords forwarded by Kabungsuwan, the newly converted Moslems gained an easy victory when fighting an enemy with wooden arrows as implements of war. Kabungsuwan soon received the submission of many chiefs, all of whom converted to Islam. Those who refused fled to the mountains and stayed away for good. Gradually, the Magindanàû absorbed all the adjacent tribes that had converted, and Islam was firmly established in the Cotabato Basin.

        The Magindanàû became politically organized as a sultanate with a sultan dominating a network of local autonomous datûs, tied together through marriage and kinship. The datûs represented the centralizing principle in a volatile society in which centrifugal forces were strong. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century they expanded their influence to the east along the Pulangi River (also called Rio Grande) into the Cotabato Basin, and to the south along the narrow coastal stripe. They reached the Davao Gulf around the beginning of the nineteenth century. They had extensive trade relations in the whole of Southeast Asia, as well as with Europeans. At one time, starting in 1648, Sultan Kudarat ruled the entire area they occupied. Otherwise, however, competing autonomous coastal and inland datûs were the setting, although they were mutually dependent. Roughly, one may say, the coastal Magindanàû stood for the external trade, while those living in the inland were the main producers. The documents of the Dutch East India Company reveal the main export articles to the Europeans to be raw materials, primarily rice and paddy, but also jungle products. In return the Magindanàû wanted mostly clothes. Certainly, they must have received other goods than clothes as well, whether from trade with the Dutch or from internal trade in the Southeast Asian Archipelago. Several Dutch traders, who visited the Sultan of the Magindanàû, noticed his unusual pomp and wealth and remarked in their reports that the Sultan was not one of the petty kings. Throughout the centuries of the Moslems' heyday, the entire Southern Mindanao must have been flooded with these prestigious goods, well known under very similar names over a large part of the Southeast Asian Archipelago. Not only had the Moslems plenty of them, but at the beginning of the twentieth century the headmen of the solaced pagan hill tribes had many as well.

        The inland Magindanàû lived in the rich and fertile Cotabato Basin, Buayan being the center of their power. Their prosperity was based on the export of agricultural products and jungle produces. The greater part of the latter probably came from trade with the hill tribes, notably Tiruray who traded rattan, beeswax, tobacco for iron tools, clothing, pots, and salt and Manúbû. When it comes to exported rice, it was produced in the Cotabato Basin. However, the major labor force for this production came from bondsmen, and slaves. In an early interview with American personnel, Datû Piang reported that in the 1870s two inland datûs each had several thousand slaves, apart from other followers. Where did the slaves come from? It is well known that the Moros in general were repeatedly on slave raids in the Spanish controlled Visayas. Some of the slaves may have been sold to the inland Magindanàû. But a substantial number of them may have come from the hill tribes. Beckett (1982), Schlegel (1972), Laarhoven (1986), and Stuart (1984) all maintain that the Magindanàû were stealing slaves in raids on the surrounding hill tribes. I might add here that information Tboli elders related to me confirmed their contention.

        At an early stage the Spaniards had intentions of gaining control over the Moslems of Cotabato. Spanish battle ships showed up outside Cotabato as early as 1637 when they razed Sultan Kudarat's settlement. However, due to a fierce resistance and fortunate external circumstances that came to their relief, the Magindanàû managed to remain outside the Spanish pale for a long time. Nonetheless, from the middle of the nineteenth century and towards the end of it they were fighting losing battles against the Spaniards. In 1861 the Sultan of Magindanàû submitted to the Spaniards, who subsequently built a fort in Cotabato City. In the Cotabato Basin a powerful alliance was formed around the highborn Datû Utu. Resistance was fierce, but manpower losses were unprecedentedly heavy, and the hill tribes suffered repeated slave raids. As the Spaniards pushed up the Pulangi River, more and more petty datûs' submitted to them. By 1888 the alliance was broken. Continuation...