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MOPPIYON KAHI DIID PATOY: Keeping Memories Alive

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KIDAPAWAN CITY (MindaNews / 22 November) On this date in 1973, the then Municipality of Kidapawan became the provincial capital of North Cotabato. Presidential Decree No. 341 partitioned the historical Cotabato Province to form three new provinces, and it designated Kidapawan as capital of one of them. 

Under the terms of the decree, the last officials of the undivided province became the founding officials of the newly created North Cotabato.

Both the Governor, Carlos Cajelo, and the Vice Governor, Alfonso O. Angeles Sr, were residents of Kidapawan. Although no records have yet emerged to shed light on the process of North Cotabato’s creation, it is almost certain that these two officials played a role in having Kidapawan designated provincial capital.

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Picture of then Mayor Alfonso Angeles as shown in the 1952 Cotabato Guidebook.

Angeles in particular had been aggressive for decades to have Kidapawan converted into a city, and its declaration as the provincial capital was one step towards that goal. Before becoming vice governor, he was Kidapawan’s founding mayor, having been elected when the municipality was created in 1947.

By all indications, Angeles was an official with a sense of history, and that he understood how efforts today will and should have implications for years to come. In his message to the 1972 Municipal Directory, he put emphasis on the directory’s value to historiography: “the lasting value of this enterprise,” he writes of the directory, “lies in its contribution to the culture and history in the making of a Municipality and its people… In the course of time, informative materials which record current facts in a locality will certainly contribute to the making of its history for the benefit of posterity.

We reflect on these words here in MindaNews, which itself records current facts and events as reportage and reflection, but which in the process has already done its part in writing history.

Angeles said his words over half a century ago, but they remain alive today.

Moppiyon kahi diid patoy, go the wisdom of another figure in Kidapawan history, the late Obo Monuvu historian Apu Salomay Iyong. Apu Salomay was a revered custodian of the vast body of Itulon (oral history) of the Monuvu of Kidapawan, and for much of his life had been the tribe’s walking encyclopedia.

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Picture of Apu Salomay Iyong from Fr. Albert Alejo’s 1999 dissertation “Generating Energies: Cultural Politics and the Geothermal Project in Mt Apo.”

Moppiyon kahi diid patoy – good words will never die.

But this pronouncement is not simply a statement of fact. It is a motto, and a call to take part.

History is the constant process of collective remembering. It is not enough that we utter or write down words, we must keep them and the memories they transmit alive. The record of facts that Angeles extols will only really contribute to posterity if we today will let them survive and keep them relevant.

That has been the ethos of my historiography as city historian of Kidapawan – to save the memories of the town my great grandfathers helped build from disappearing into oblivion, and to find renewed significance for them.

The provincial government now no longer celebrates 22 November as foundation date, most of Kidapawan no longer remembers Angeles and Salomay Iyong. But here we are, talking about them long after their time, keeping their words alive.

Moppiyon kahi diid patoy. By the leave of Apu Salomay’s family I use these words as title for this column, which I will be using as platform to raise further awareness about Kidapawan history, continuing the never-ending battle against forgetting.

And I do so continuing not only the work I inherited from Apu Salomay and all the historians before me, I also continue the work I have been doing for almost two decades.

I was just a student in the Ateneo de Davao thirteen years ago when I started what has now become my calling. For a class with the artist Noi Narciso I undertook the documentation of the hitherto unwritten history of Kidapawan’s Kiram Mansion, the building that would first serve as capitol building to the new province created on this date.

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The intact Kiram Mansion, with the architect-owner, Vicente Austria (in pink). Photo courtesy of the Austria/Kiram family

The beautiful, stately home was designed by its architect-owner, Capt. Vicente Austria, the purported Sultan Omar Kiram of Uyaan. The man, the story goes, had a colourful background: as the heir to a small sultanate in Lanao, he was kidnapped and unwittingly sold to a Christian soldier, who adopted him and raised him as a son. A lifetime later he had found himself back in the small, isolated Sultanate that he was yet to discover was his hometown. Here his old governess recognized him, and “the lost sultan” had finally been found.

You can read more details about the story on the article I had written on it in Dagmay in 2010, my first published work of historiography.

Whether or not the story is true, what is certain is that Austria was a talented architect, and he reflected his Meranaw heritage in the home he had built and later rented to the provincial government. The building merges features of the Meranaw Torogan with Paladian architecture.

(We take the opportunity to pay belated tribute to Captain Austria’s centenarian widow, Nelly Lee Kelley Austria, who passed away last 3 November at the age of 101.)

Later, after Angeles and other provincial governors moved to the present provincial government complex in Baranggay Amas, the Kiram Mansion housed the Regional Trial Court. It was here where the killers of Fr. Tullio Favali were tried in the 1980s.

Despite its architectural and historical significance, the building was demolished over an inheritance dispute in 2007.

The demolition threw into relief for me how all these details had not been documented. And so I took it upon myself to write about it so that it may continue to live, at least only in memory.

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Interior of the surviving parts of the Kiram Mansion, which now houses Out of Nowhere Kitchen Kidapawan.

But in the end it lived on as more than memory, for around a decade after I had written about the destruction of the Kiram Mansion, its remains were restored. Another son of Kidapawan, businessman Nathan Floresta, took the challenge of restoring the surviving one-third of the house, and today it houses his restaurant, Out of Nowhere Kitchen Kidapawan. North Cotabato’s first provincial capitol building became Kidapawan’s first heritage adaptive reuse success story. 

Like the Kiram Mansion, my work documenting Kidapawan history is now replete with memories brought back to life.

Three of Angeles’ predecessors were particularly significant figures I had managed to save from obscurity.

Datu Ingkal Ugok, who had been appointed by the Americans in 1908 as the town’s earliest colonial official, had been almost completely forgotten by Kidapawan (Apu Salomay was one of the last to keep his memory alive).

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Datu Siawan Ingkal. Photo courtesy of his daughter, Bo-i Evelyn Ingkal Polo

His son, Datu Siawan Ingkal, had long been called “first mayor,” but he never held the title, being sole holder instead of the position of “Municipal District President.” Datu Siawan would hold this title until 1947, when he was elected Kidapawan’s first Vice Mayor.

Datu Ingkal and Datu Siawan were Kidapawan’s founding figures, but Kidapawan had all but forgotten them. Philippine neo-coloniality, which displaces anything indigenous in lieu of anything “Filipino,” is one major force behind this erasure. It has also been my ethos to record history against this force, seeking to write history that records all perspectives, even that of the eschewed and the defeated. To this end I have asserted the primacy of the indigenous Obo Monuvu in the historical emergence of Kidapawan as entity and community.

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Filomeno Blanco. Photo courtesy of the City Government of Kidapawan

Defeat certainly seems to have also been a factor behind the town’s forgetting of another of Angeles’ predecessors, Filomeno Blanco. Born on this date in 1905, the settler Blanco had been “appointed” mayor by the Japanese during the Second World War. But he had effectively been held hostage, the locals compelled to follow the Japanese soldiers for fear that Blanco and his family would be killed. When the war ended, Blanco was tried and convicted of collaboration, but as testament to how much everyone knew the situation, he was only sentenced to incarceration for one night.

Only very few elderly people in Kidapawan remember his name and story today. Today, we remember his sacrifice and the town’s love for him again.

And we must continue remembering, because the process of collective remembering is necessarily constant. We must keep on talking about the past, because only by talking about it does it stay alive, continuing to offer new insight and ideas for the challenges of the future.

Moppiyon kahi diid patoy. Let us make good of the words we have inherited.

(Mindaviews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Karlo Antonio G. David has been writing the history of Kidapawan City for the past thirteen years. He has documented seven previously unrecorded civilian massacres, the lives of many local historical figures, and the details of dozens of forgotten historical incidents in Kidapawan. He was invested by the Obo Monuvu of Kidapawan as “Datu Pontivug,” with the Gaa (traditional epithet) of “Piyak nod Pobpohangon nod Kotuwig don od Ukaa” (Hatchling with a large Cockscomb, Already Gifted at Crowing). The Don Carlos Palanca and Nick Joaquin Literary Awardee has seen print in Mindanao, Cebu, Dumaguete, Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, and Tokyo. His first collection of short stories, “Proclivities: Stories from Kidapawan,” came out in 2022.)

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