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Indonesia, Mindanao and persistent connections

Ariel C. Lopez

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The scene is familiar: a group of men raising the Philippine flag and explicitly claiming the Philippines as their 'choice,' but it's not in the Philippines. Welcome to Talaud.

PHILIPPINE FLAG. Photo of the news item in Manado Post (16 December 2013), the article says ‘Raising of the Philippine flag has to be taken seriously’.

TALAUD, Indonesia – The scene is seemingly familiar: a group of men raising the Philippine flag and explicitly claiming the Philippines as their “choice,” except that it’s not in the Philippines nor are the men Filipinos by citizenship. 

Welcome to Talaud, Indonesia.  

When I came to Tahuna, the main city of the Sangir archipelago, in mid-December last year for research, the picture above was one of the headlines in the local newspapers. While it is significant enough to capture the attention of local authorities in north Sulawesi, it passed by as a footnote in Indonesian national news and, as far as I know, was not mentioned in Philippine news. I came here as a student of history and immediately felt that the past is very much alive. 

Mindanao and Sulawesi 

Sangir-Talaud, as it is usually referred, is an island group between Mindanao and Sulawesi. The ties that bind these islands with mainland Mindanao go back centuries, long before the creation of the Philippine and Indonesian nation-states.

Sangil, a language spoken in the southern Philippine provinces of Sarangani and Davao del Sur, shares 90 % lexical similarity (meaning almost the same!) with Sangir, the language spoken in the main Sangir island (part of Indonesia).

Sarangani and Maguindanao historical figures constitute an important part of local folklore in the Sangir islands.

My personal favorite is the story of Salawo, a prince from the island of Balut (Sarangani) who came to Siau, an island of Sangir, to ask the hand of its princess. But instead of having a wedding, Salawo somehow met his death at the hands of one of the Sangirese princes. The news of Salawo’s death – believed to have been relayed by a mythical parrot which flew from Sangir all the way to Mindanao – reached the Maguindanao sultanate’s court. A Maguindanao raja named Anti, presumably a relative of Salawo, vowed to avenge the Sarangani prince’s death by mounting a raiding expedition composed of several large prahu (sea vessel) against Sangir. For the Sangirese, this was the beginning and the cause, of the slave-raiding expedition that made Maguindanao (and Sulu) infamous in much of the Indonesian archipelago during the pre-modern times.  

The historical documents from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) who had long claimed legal rights not only over the Sangir islands, but also over Sarangani after the treaty signed by a Sangirese raja in the 1670s, prove the historical authenticity of Salawo and his murder (but not of the messenger parrot!). It is also worthwhile to note that some of the earliest maps with fine details of southern Mindanao were drawn by the Dutch, most likely drawing upon the local knowledge of the region from the Sangirese.

This was the period much before the 19th century Spanish subjugation of areas like Davao and Maguindanao. Indeed, it is not widely known that “Dabo” had existed long before it was conquered by the Spanish and became “Davao.”

HISTORY. The author, posing in the village office of Kendahe, a sub-district in the main Sangir island (Sangihe Besar).

Today, despite the formal controls posed by the current nation-state regimes of Indonesia and the Philippines – with mutual border checks, customs and immigration offices – connections between Mindanao and the Sangir islands remain.

While it is difficult to travel from Sangir to Mindanao and vice-versa because of the lack of passenger ships, private vessels irregularly shuttle between these border zones. Some of the people I talked with in Sangir had been to General Santos City to visit their families. At least one store in Tahuna exclusively sells Philippine products. San Miguel, Red Horse and Tanduay are some of the sought-after Philippine brands, imported or otherwise, because alcoholic products are difficult to obtain or are very expensive in Indonesia.      

The flag-raising incident in Talaud, done by some villagers who were unhappy with the local election process, was interpreted by many locals – including my Indonesian friend and travel companion – as a nuisance and mere publicity.

It may point however to the persistent connections – real or imagined – between the people of border zones of the Philippines and Indonesia. These ties are deeper than being a ‘Filipino’ or ‘Indonesian’ and to me, they are worth discovering. – Rappler.com 

Ariel C Lopez is a PhD candidate of history at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He received his BA in history at UP Diliman.

   

 

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