Second of a series
I COULD not help but react to the recent statement of former American soldier Erwin Tulfo that circulated in social media saying, “We fought foreign invaders in the past with only crude weapons but a lot of courage, sweat and blood — and we succeeded.” Tulfo exposed his deep ignorance of history with that statement, but not in the sense of the equally dense response attributed in social media memes to former Commission on Higher Education chairman Prospero de Vera III, who supposedly asked, “Kanino ba tayo nanalo at nagtagumpay?”
This exchange reminds me of the characters in the 1994 Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels movie.
In the previous part of this series I wrote:
“Similar to Tulfo’s words, Spanish and American colonizers had the habit of giving two simultaneous statements about Filipinos when they came to colonize our country: one belittling Filipinos for being uncivilized, backward, etc., and another simultaneously praising us for the wisdom to embrace the civilizing agenda of colonial rule.
Tulfo praised Filipinos for their courage and willingness to shed blood and sweat to defend the nation — as he did for the United States — on the one hand, but also disparaged our kalinangan for producing crude weapons only vis-a-vis the superiority of foreign invaders.”
Our weapons were not crude. Rather, they were sophisticated in relation to the economic and security concerns of the times. Let me elaborate more on that.
Our country at the time of Spanish contact in the 16th century may be divided into the coastal communities that dotted the archipelago, the inland or upstream polities and those in the hinterlands. Teodoro Agoncillo’s “History of the Filipino People” described them as “lineal or nucleated barangay settlements scattered along water routes and river banks (in a pattern of ilaya or upstream, and ibaba or downstream) and mountain ridges.”
One may visualize the divisions this way: There were barangay — or confederation of barangay that manifested themselves, for instance, during the Battle of Bangkusay in 1571 and the so-called Tondo Conspiracy of the 1580s — in the Manila Bay and Pasig River area following the upstream and downstream configuration reaching all the way to the provinces of Rizal and Laguna, as well as Batangas, Bulacan and Pampanga through a series of smaller waterways. These upstream and downstream settlement patterns are also visible in different parts of the archipelago.
Additionally, there were dispersed hinterland communities throughout the country populated by Indigenous peoples, or IPs.
This setup existed as such because it was not the intention of any singular leader or community to lord it over the entire archipelago. That could be because to do so requires tremendous resources which the Philippine economy of the 16th century could hardly provide except in the case of the sultanates in the south. This is best illustrated in the dynamics between Humabon, Lapulapu and other chieftains in which Ferdinand Magellan unwittingly and fatally got sucked into in 1521 — Cebu and nearby polities were not organized under a unified leader.
To be sure, political and economic structure in the country was variegated into levels of loosely organized barangay or a confederation of barangay, and townships or a confederation of townships that manifested in the Islamic southern Philippines as sultanates. This is why O.W. Wolters’ notion of a “mandala” or “circle of kings” for a time captivated Filipino and other Southeast Asian historians who were seeking a theoretical or conceptual device to provide a semblance of a system for the seemingly chaotic politics of the archipelago.
Territorial expansion did not appear to be a priority for polities in the Philippine archipelago. As such, sieges for military conquest were virtually absent in the precolonial history of the country. Consequently, there was no need for the equivalent of heavy European cannons with long barrels and wide bores that fired projectiles across long distances.
Filipinos were also not engaged in long distance sea travel as regional trade — entrepot trade and interisland commerce — proved sufficient for the purposes of precolonial economy. Having China and India nearby was providential for the commercial needs of the Southeast Asian region. Thus, I wrote in part one of this series:
“... our ancestors were not in the habit of building large ships — with large and heavy cannons — such as the Spanish galleons. While Filipinos had the technical competence to build such ships — our ancestors built the galleons in the shipyards of Cavite under forced labor — they were unnecessary for our specific needs and purposes.”
Tulfo’s notion, therefore, of Filipinos and their crude weapons is a perverted imagination of our national history, drawn from the misguided and hallucinatory biases of an ex-US military personnel. Our ancestors were armed with weapons that were relevant and sophisticated for their purposes and needs, consistent with the political, economic, geographical and technological circumstances of the time.
Of what use were the European cannons when there were no roads to penetrate the hinterlands of the archipelago? This is why the Cordilleras and other IP communities successfully evaded Spanish colonialism for a long time.
The cannons could be mounted on the galleons but as seen in the Battle of Mactan, the ships (and guns) were rendered useless by shallow waters and low tide, as well as in the upstream/ilaya riverside communities across the country. In the thick vegetation of the Philippines, arquebuses and hand culverins were neutralized by guerrilla tactics and the close quarter combat effectiveness of bladed weapons, which we had a wide array of for different purposes such as slashing, hacking, etc. Magellan did not live long enough to learn this bitter lesson having met his death in Mactan in 1521.
On the part of de Vera, I have not independently confirmed whether the supposed quote is properly and accurately attributed to him. Nevertheless, the lack of sophistication of it must be discussed in detail in another piece.
For now, suffice it to say that evaluating the conflict between Filipinos and colonizers as “wins” or “losses” is a gross oversimplification of Philippine history. The struggles against colonialism were uncannily long drawn out such that they escaped the narrow confines of vulgar categorizations.
To be continued
