Man, Past and Present

by A. H. Keane

The Philippine Natives.

In the Philippines, where the ethnical confusion is probably greater than in any other part of Malaysia, the great bulk of the inhabitants appear to be of Indonesian and proto-Malayan stocks. Except in the southern island of Mindanao, which is still mainly Muhammadan or heathen, most of the settled populations have long been nominal Roman Catholics under a curious theocratic administration, in which the true rulers are not the civil functionaries, but the priests, and especially the regular clergy[551]. One result has been over three centuries of unstable political and social relations, ending in the occupation of the archipelago by the United States (1898). Another, with which we are here more concerned, has been such a transformation of the subtle Malayan character that those who have lived longest amongst the natives pronounce their temperament unfathomable. Having to comply outwardly with the numerous Christian observances, they seek relief in two ways, first by making the most of the Catholic ceremonial and turning the many feast-days of the calendar into occasions of revelry and dissipation, connived at if not even shared in by the padres[552]; secondly by secretly cherishing the old beliefs and disguising their true feelings, until the opportunity is presented of throwing off the mask and declaring themselves in their true colours. A Franciscan friar, who had spent half his life amongst them, left on record that "the native is an incomprehensible phenomenon, the mainspring of whose line of thought and the guiding motive of whose actions have never yet been, and perhaps never will be, discovered. A native will serve a master satisfactorily for years, and then suddenly abscond, or commit some such hideous crime as conniving with a brigand band to murder the family and pillage the house[553]."

In fact nobody can ever tell what a Tagal, and especially a Visaya, will do at any moment. His character is a succession of surprises; "the experience of each year brings one to form fresh conclusions, and the most exact definition of such a kaleidoscopic creature is, after all, hypothetical."

After centuries of misrule, it was perhaps not surprising that no kind of sympathy was developed between the natives and the whites. Foreman fells us that everywhere in the archipelago he found mothers teaching their little ones to look on their white rulers as demoniacal beings, evil spirits, or at least something to be dreaded. "If a child cries, it is hushed by the exclamation, Castila! (Spaniard); if a white man approaches a native dwelling, the watchword always is Castila! and the children hasten to retreat from the dreadful object."

Three Social Groups.

The Indios.

For administrative purposes the natives were classed in three social divisions—Indios, Infieles, and Moros—which, as aptly remarked by F. H. H. Guillemard, is "an ecclesiastical rather than a scientific classification[554]." The Indios were the Christianized and more or less cultured populations of all the towns and of the settled agricultural districts, speaking a distinct Malayo-Polynesian language of much more archaic type than the standard Malay. According to the census of 1903 the total population of the islands was 7,635,428, of whom nearly 7,000,000 were classed as civilised, and the rest as wild, including 23,000 Negritoes (Aeta, see p. 156). At the time of the Spanish occupation in the sixteenth century the Visayas of the central islands and part of Mindanao were the most advanced among the native tribes, but this distinction is now claimed for the Tagalogs, who form the bulk of the population in Manila and other parts of Luzon, and also in Mindanao, and whose language is gradually displacing other dialects throughout the archipelago. Other civilised tribes are the Ilocano, Bicol, Pangasinan, Pampangan and Cagayan, all of Luzon. Less civilised tribes are the Manobo, Mandaya, Subano and Bagobo of Mindanao, the Bukidnon of Mindanao and the central islands, the Tagbanua and Batak of Palawan, and the Igorots of Luzon, some of whom are industrious farmers, while among others, head-hunting is still prevalent. These have been described by A. E. Jenks in a monograph[555]. The head form is very variable. Of 32 men measured by Jenks the extremes of cephalic index were 91.48 and 67.48. The stature is always low, averaging 1.62 m. (5 ft. 4 in.) but with an appearance of greater height. The hair is black, straight, lank, coarse and abundant but "I doubt whether to-day an entire tribe of perfectly straight-haired primitive Malayan people exists in the archipelago[556]."

The Moros.

Under Moros ("Moors") are comprised the Muhammadans exclusively, some of whom are Malayans (chiefly in Mindanao, Basilan, and Palawan), some true Malays (chiefly in the Sulu archipelago). Many of these are still independent, and not a few, if not actually wild, are certainly but little removed from the savage state. Yet, like the Sumatran Battas, they possess a knowledge of letters, the Sulu people using the Arabic script, as do all the Orang-Maláyu, while the Palawan natives employ a variant of the Devanagari prototype derived directly from the Javanese, as above explained. They number nearly 280,000, of whom more than one half are in Mindanao, and they form the bulk of the population in some of the islands of the Sulu archipelago.

Some of these Sulu people, till lately fierce sea-rovers, get baptized now and then; but, says Foreman, "they appeared to be as much Christian as I was Mussulman[557]." They keep their harems all the same, and when asked how many gods there are, answer "four," presumably Allah plus the Athanasian Trinity. So the Ba-Fiots of Angola add crucifying to their "penal code," and so in King M'tesa's time the Baganda scrupulously kept two weekly holidays, the Mussulman Friday, and the Christian Sunday. Lofty creeds superimposed too rapidly on primitive beliefs are apt to get "mixed"; they need time to become assimilated.