When I was a child, we had a family bogeyman. I thought we were the only ones with such. The term bogeyman is defined as “a common allusion to a mythical creature in many cultures used by adults to frighten children into good behavior.”
Today I realize my bogeyman was everyone else’s. More astounding was that nearly all over the Philippine archipelago, the bogeyman was the same as mine, and that was no other but the Moro.
“The Moro will come, tie you up and take you to Marawi,” was a refrain common in our part of the islands, and in our otherwise sedate and conservative household, when misbehavior beckoned.
What brought about this cruel stereotyping of the Moro that today taxicabs in Manila refuse rides for women wearing the hijab, the traditional veil Muslim women use to cover the head? What brought about such irrational stereotyping that pervaded the public discussions on the Bangsamoro Basic Law during the unlamented Aquino regime?
We owe it to the wisdom of the late Jesuit scholar Miguel Bernad, hailed in his lifetime as the Magus of Mindanao. (NB: “magus,” the singular of “magi,” the term used to refer to the Three Kings who visited Jesus, as related in Chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew; magi is today commonly taken to mean as “wise men.”) Only Bernad, among ALL our Filipino historians, had the acumen to explain how that stereotype arose.
At the onset of the 1700s, Chinese tea was in great demand in England. The common staple of hospitality served English guests, including those of the monarch’s, Chinese tea consumption in the 1700s was two and a half pounds each month. By 1801, England was spending 2 million pounds for imported Chinese tea which was bartered for Indian cotton cloth worth 27 million pounds. The trade imbalance was substantial.
To offset that, England turned to the midway Sultanate of Sulu for goods relished in the Chinese market. These consisted of tripang (sea slugs), Swift bird’s nest for soup on Chinese lauriat tables, tortoise shells (an environmental mortal sin today!), pearls and nacre (mother of pearl).
But the mighty Sultanate of Sulu had one problem—laborers to extract these export goods. Pearls and mother of pearls needed divers, sea slugs’ harvest needed beachcombers, and bird’s nests needed cave spelunkers. To address these needs, an idea came about: slave labor.
Sea raiders were deployed, using the proficient Sama Balangingi and the fierce Iranun to ravage the Visayas and Luzon, and parts of northern Mindanao. That is the reason watchtowers and fortress churches were built around the archipelago. It is the image of the Moro as slave raiders that has clung to our historically recalcitrant minds. Today we continue to think of them as “kidnappers.”
Under great pressure to offset the trade imbalance and in exchange for the goods from Sulu and its satellite environs (which then included North Borneo and the island of Celebes), the English provided the Sulu sultan with Chinese silk and porcelain, and then guns and gunpowder. Hence, the Moro raids were fully armed and could not be suppressed until the coming of Spain’s vapor de guerra (steam-powered gunboats) in the
second decade of the 1800s.
It has been said that the Sultan of Sulu amassed some 30,000 slaves from 1770 to 1879. This is how our Moro bogeyman came to be. Bernad cautions us: The Moro were merely middlemen. The English protected human trading. Eventually, captured slaves were sold in the markets of Batavia for Dutch guilders.
Firepower and prejudice against the Moro did not come with the Americans in the latter part of the 1900s. The English provided firepower much earlier, while the Dutch financed human trading.
In one of his daily monotonous lambasts, Rodrigo Duterte had his history books wrong as usual by saying firepower was unleashed on Mindanao by the Americans. He who revises history must go back to the classroom.
Historians should speak up. Daily rants are not to be believed.