PRE-COLONIAL CAVITE
BEFORE
the Spaniards came to the Philippines in the early part of the sixteenth
century, the native of this country had already achieved a fairly high degree
of civilization. After the
disappearance of the land bridges wave upon wave of immigrants from South Asia
and adjoining islands came on different types of watercraft the best-known of
which was the barangay (a Spanish corruption of the authentic Tagalog word
balangay) capable of carrying as many as thirty families totaling about 100
persons. They brought with them their
own culture and civilization manifested in their knowledge, beliefs, customs,
habits, working tools, utensils, weapons, etc.
As these immigrants came from different places, possessing different
lifestyles, the resulting civilization represented a harmonious blending of all
cultures rather than one culture replacing another.
“Six
to eight waves of civilization had reach the Philippines,” says a noted
American anthropologist, ”leaving their influences upon the life of the
islands… They have been superimposed: but they have interpenetrated one another
until today there is probably not a single nationality but shares in some
measure the effects of everyone of the cultures. Civilization reached the Philippines in layers: but the
stratification has long since become intricately displaced, and completely interwoven.”
After
the first waved of immigrants consisting of the Pygmies, the seafaring
Indonesians came about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, bringing with them their
Neolithic culture. The third wave
consisted of the Malays who possessed the Iron Age culture of about 200 B.C. to
1,500 A.D. These Malays were the lineal
ancestors of the present-day Filipinos, according to Prof. H. Otley Beyer
(1883-1966), distinguished anthropologist from Edgewood, Iowa, who devoted 60
years of his life to the study of the prehistory of the Philippines and to the
training of Filipino scholars in the field of anthropology and archeology. Another scientist, Prof. R. O. Windstedt,
says these proto-Malays had polished stone tools, lived in houses of bamboo and
rattan lashings, raised rice, millet and other food crops, domesticated
animals, used clothes from beaten bark of trees, and possessed some knowledge
of astronomy. They were also excellent
hunters and fishermen.
The
early natives, according to Jose Rizal, came from Sumatra which have been
populated by Malays from South Asia between 2,000 and 1,000 years before the
Christian Era, and who subsequently migrated to Indonesia. These Malays exhibited some Indian influence
in their political and social institutions, religious beliefs and practices,
laws, language and literature, and system of writing. Aside from the Indian
influence, the culture of the early natives was affected by Chinese and Arabian
traders in matters relating to commerce, trade, language, and religion. Mohammedanism was introduced in Southern
Philippines from it expanded its influence to other parts of the archipelago,
as far as Manila and adjoining areas, during the 400 year sway of the
Shri-Visayan Empire (400 to 800 A.D.) and of the larger and more aggressive
Majapajit Empire (1200 to 1400 A.D.), the latter reaching its zenith in 1478
A.D., less than half a century before the Spanish contact.
Religion
wise the Spaniards came here just in time to halt the further spread of Islam
or Mohammedanism to all the Visayas and Luzon.
“If the Spaniards had delayed their arrival further,” says Dr. Antonio
de Morga, who became the 10th Spanish governor-general of the
Philippines (1595 to 1596), “this
religion would have spread over the islands, and it would have been difficult
to the de-Mohammedanize them. The mercy
of God put a tiny remedy to that. Since
the sect (more properly called religion – ABS) had just begun to spread in the
country, it was successfully uprooted from the Islands”. Of course, Morga was partly wrong because
Islam, it turned out, had come to stay in Mindanao, successfully resisting
Spanish attempts to uproot it.
One
of the highlights of the Malay immigrations to the Philippines is told in the
Maragtas (great people), an account of the coming of ten Bornean datus headed
by Datu Puti after escaping from the tyrannical rule of Sultan Makatunaw. Puti
was a minister of the sultan. Landing
on Panay Island on mid 13th-century, they eventually negotiated the
purchase of the coastal areas of the island from its ruler, Marikudo. They established three colonies in Panay
under the Confederation of Mad-yas, the ancient name of the island. Later three datus migrated to Lake Taal in
Batangas, but their leader, Datu Puti, tired of his odyssey, returned to Borneo
alone, relating his adventure to his people.
Subsequent
waves of immigrants from India, China, Japan, and Arabia reached the
Philippines before Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer, came in 1521
under the banner of Charles I of Spain.
The arrival of these immigrants further enriched the civilization of the
natives. As with the rest of the country, the natives in what is now Known as
Cavite lived in regularly constituted settlements, the oldest of which were
Cavite el Viejo (now Kawit) and Silang.
Set up in argues or sturdy wooden posts, with thatch nipa or cogon
roofing, their houses were small but cool and perfectly suitable to the
tropical climate. “Each house”, says
Morga, “is separated and is not constructed adjoining one another.” Why?
The Spanish chronicler does not provide the answer,
but one may surmise that this was a manifestation of the traditional spirit of
independence and self-reliance of the natives, especially the Caviteños. This
explains the absence of kings among them, particularly the Tagalogs. But they
had datus and rajahs, indicating they were not averse to subordination to a
higher authority for the common good. Given time to develop, the natives, by
their innate talent, might have been eventually evolved a higher form of
political and social organization, perhaps not a kingdom in the western sense
but a large confederation under a paramount chief periodically elected for
purposes of common defense against outside aggression.
The native society at the Spanish contact was
characterized by social classes, but not the kind of western classes arising
from their relation to the means of production, viz, the worker who sells his
labor power to the capitalist who owns the factory or industrial establishment.
The society then constituted three classes; namely, (1) the maharlika (noblemen headed by the datu
or rajah; (2) the timagua (freeman);
and (3) alipin saguiguilib and alipin namamahay which Spanish writers
erroneously termed as slaves but were actually mere servants who had gotten
into debts and who could at any time buy out their freedom from their masters.
Rizal
mentions a more precise division of classes in his annotation of Morga’s work;
namely, the ruling class, the productive class, and the servant class (head,
body, and feet). Evidently, the servants were not, as pictured by Spanish
writers, chattel slaves in the western sense.
Spanish
priest-historians have discussed extensively the customs and habits of the
natives and found them not much different from those of other races in the same
stage of civilization. Intelligence, like riches, can be acquired or developed
but only through a long process or struggle. Given the same objective
conditions, all races develop their intelligence at comparatively the same rate
of progress.