[Philippine history of tyranny] Philippine society and revolution #2/86
The second Indonesian wave came about 1,500 B.C. from Indochina and south China bringing with them a late neolithic or bronze-copper culture.
What would later compose the main racial stock of the Filipino people, the Malay, came in three major waves. The first wave of the Malays came from a southern direction between 300 and 200 B.C. bringing with them Indian cultural influences. The second wave came between the first century and the 13th century and became the main ancestors of the Tagalogs, Ilocanos, Pampangos, Visayans and Bicolanos. As they were equipped with a system of writing, they were the first to leave historical records. The third wave of Malays who came between the latter half of the 14th century and the 15th century came the Arab traders and religious teachers who laid the foundation of Islam in Sulu and in mainland Mindanao.
The national minorities of today comprise at least 10 per cent of the population. They inhabited the greater part of the archipelago until a few decades ago when landgrabbers started to dispossess and oppress them. They have been set apart from the rest of the people principally by Christian chauvinism employed by Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism, as in the case of the Muslims in Mindanao and the non-Christian mountain tribes all over the country. There is also Malay racism bred by foreign and feudal exploiters of the people. This is often directed against the Chinese and the Aetas.
To this day, there are more than 100 languages and dialects. The nine most widely spoken are Tagalog, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Sugbuhanon, Bicol, Pampango, Pangasinan, Samarnon, and Maguindanao. Tagalog is the principal base of the national language which can now be spoken by the majority of the people in varying degrees of fluency.
II. THE PEOPLE UPON THE COMING OF THE SPANISH COLONIALISTS
Before the coming of Spanish colonialists, the people of the Philippine archipelago had already attained a semicommunal and semislave social system in many parts and also a feudal system in certain parts, especially in Mindanao and Sulu, where such a feudal faith as Islam had already taken roots. The Aetas had the lowest form of social organization, which was primitive communal.
The barangay was the typical community in the whole archipelago. It was the basic political and economic unit independent of similar others. Each embraced a few hundreds of people and a small territory. Each was headed by a chieftain called the rajah or datu.
The social structure comprised a petty nobility, the ruling class which had started to accumulate land that it owned privately or administered in the name of the clan or community; an intermediate class of freemen called the maharlikas who had enough land for their livelihood or who rendered special service to the rulers and who did not have to work in the fields; and the ruled classes that included the timawas, the serfs who shared the crops with the petty nobility, and also the slaves and semislaves who worked without having any definite share in the harvest. There were two kinds of slaves then: those who had their own quarters, the aliping namamahay, and those who lived in their master’s house, the aliping sagigilid. One acquired the status of a serf or a slave by inheritance, failure to pay debts and tribute, commission of crimes and captivity in wars between barangays.
The Islamic sultanates of Sulu and mainland Mindanao represented a higher stage of political and economic development than the barangay. These had a feudal form of social organization. Each of them encompassed more people and wider territory than the barangay. The sultan reigned supreme over several datus and was conscious of his privilege to rule as a matter of hereditary “divine right.”
Though they presented themselves mainly as administrators of communal lands, apart from being direct owners of certain lands, the sultans, datus and the nobility exacted land rent in the form of religious tribute and lived off the toiling masses. They constituted a landlord class attended by a retinue of religious teachers, scribes and leading warriors.
The sultanates emerged in the two centuries precedent to the coming of Spanish colonialists. They were built up among the so-called third wave of Malay migrants whose rulers either tried to convert to Islam, bought out, enslaved or drove away the original non-Muslim inhabitants of the areas that they chose to settle in. Serfs and slaves alike were used to till the fields and to make more clearings from the forest.
Throughout the archipelago, the scope of barangays could be enlarged either through the expansion of agriculture by the toil of the slaves or serfs, through conquests in war and through interbarangay marriages of the nobility.