Mozart Pastrano
SUDDENLY, people are talking about Lumbia. About the possible use of the old airport by the US military. About a plan to move City Hall in Lumbia. About plans, drawn up by the City Government of Cagayan de Oro with the assistance of the UN-Habitat, for a proposed city extension in Lumbia, which entails moving the regional government center there, among other things.
There is delicious irony in such development. As it happened, the city’s foreparents used to stay up in such highlands, in a place near Lumbia called Himologan.
The Spanish friars convinced them to come down the hills and live in a settlement in the lowlands.
As it turned out, these lowlands were but the river’s flood plains. After learning its lessons the hard way, the city is now planning to go back to the highlands to build a more resilient city center.
Without meaning to, we are giving in to our foreparents’ wisdom and going up to where it all began.
Allow us to do a retelling of this story of urban development, thanks to available historical material.
In 1622, a pair of Spanish Augustinian Recollects hopped on a seafaring vessel from the bustling primeval kingdom of Butuan and ventured 40 leagues westwards, skimming along the shoreline of Northern Mindanao. They had heard of a Higaunon datu who ruled over a picturesque river valley in the nearby region. The two brought along on this journey the datu’s aunt, a new convert to the faith.
She regaled them with stories of her people, how they lived in what must have seemed to the Spanish priests like survival mode. She said they hunted bats, snakes, field rats, monkeys, and birds. They fished in the rivers. They planted rice and corn in the slash-and-burn method, and picked fruits and vegetables along the way.
As the Augustinian Recollects made a stopover in Camiguin Island, waiting for the go-signal to proceed, a crucial piece of information prodded them on: the Higaunons were a peace-loving people. They were known for their ritual for making peace, the tampudas hu Balagun, or the ceremony of the green vine branch: cutting the vine was symbolic of the act of breaking off feuds among them.
Leading them in this ceremony, and in the other rites and rituals of community life, was the datu, who was also the administrator, the army chief, the treasurer, the healer, the priest, and the P.R. guy to hobnob with guests and visitors. His name was Datu Salangsang.
His village was ensconced in an inaccessible cliff that plunged perilously into the scraggly rocks segueing into a yawning river valley. This river happened to be the gateway to the heartland of Mindanao—a busy waterway that made possible the dynamic exchanges of people and ideas, goods and services, ways of worship and ways of living.
But the river was first and foremost the community’s main resource. It provided drinking water as well as fish and other fresh edibles. It was the venue for rest and recreation: you could swim there or go lolloping in a canoe to sundry adventures. By the river the community staked their stewardship of the land and the surrounding territory and all the promise it held.
There, in its secret, sacred places, they marked milestones, binding people and place in a compact of kinship. Of skinship.
Thus flowed the river embodying passage—of time, of generations, of the community’s stories and values and lessons learned the hard way.
Fray Agustin de San Pedro, the next Augustinian Recollect assigned to the area, was amazed at Datu Salangsang’s village. It was called Himologan, because of the way the villagers cast down rough ropes from their perch on the cliff so that visitors could clamber up the village, as if in a Rapunzel dream.
This was the only way to enter their lair.
The priest saw at once that with this arrangement the village was trapped by its impenetrability without its knowing it. He sensed that the community lived in fear. As it turned out, the Higaunons were anxious about the incessant attacks of Sultan Kudarat from the south. These slave raids had been wreaking havoc even in this peaceable kingdom. Not just the men but especially the women and the children were at risk.
Fray Agustin, schooled in Plato, impressed on Datu Salangsang that fear should not set the dynamics of community life. Instead, the assurance of order and security and justice should free the citizens from worry. And he right away suggested that the datu move the village site northwards, up eight kilometers from Himologan, at a strategic bend in the river a safe distance near the sea.
He engaged the datu with his knowledge of military strategy, promising to secure the new village with a wooden fort boasting remarkable firepower. Fray Agustin was not called “El Padre Capitan” in Philippine history for nothing; he built what became, many years later, the stone-braced Fuerza Real de San Jose, which a Spanish historian described thus: “It was a square fort with two embankments, of which the first was 80 feet, the second 50 feet, enclosing gunpowder magazines and other equipment. It had two caliber-8 canons, 8 muskets, 15 arquebuses, 998 lead bullets for the muskets and arquebuses.”
Datu Salangsang was duly impressed by Fray Agustin’s assurances and, in 1626, led the Higaunons down the cliff to the new settlement downstream. (to be continued)
