KIDAPAWAN CITY (MindaNews / 01 April) – On 15 March, 1951 something remarkable happened in Kidapawan History.

Datu Siawan Ingkal, then Vice Mayor of Kidapawan, took to the Municipal Council’s podium and delivered his only recorded speech.

There was an ongoing dispute that month over the border between the then undivided provinces of Davao and Cotabato. Kidapawan was then a border town (Makilala would not be formed until 1954), and in a rare and early case of government relying on tribal history, people from the Provincial Government had asked Datu Siawan Ingkal to elucidate on the matter.

What is passed down to us now is the oldest documented historiography of Kidapawan, transmitted by no less than one of its early key players:

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Long before the coming of the Spaniards, stories had been told and handed down from father to son that the boundary of Davao and Cotabato was Matanao River. When the natives (Manobo) were organized like Barangays the people living west of Matanao River were ruled by the datus of Kidapawan. With the span of many years the people or rather the natives living west of Matanao River were paying tributes to the ruling datus of Kidapawan. Due to tradition and tribal affinities of the people, cases and questions that may arise among the natives west of Matanao River had always been decided by the datus of Kidapawan because by common agreement among themselves Matanao River is the boundary of Davao and Cotabato. When the Americans first arrived in the year 1908, Datu Ingkal, father of the present Vice Mayor, Datu Siawan Ingkal of Kidapawan was assigned as “CAPITAN ” by Col. Stevens and continued his control and jurisdiction over the datus west of Matanao River. In the year 1914, when Kidapawan became a Municipal District, Datu Siawan Ingkal was appointed Municipal District President. Datus Iman and Banog living at Barrio Kinuskusan west of Matanao River were also appointed as Municipal District Councilors of Kidapawan with territorial jurisdiction up to Matanao River. In that year schools were put up and the children west of Matanao River were admitted in Kidapawan School. Collection of taxes and building of roads and trails up to Matanao River were done by the Province of Cotabato. Former administrators like Col. Stevens, Gov. Carpenter and Director Teopisto Guingona have always made the Municipal Officials of Kidapawan understand that the boundary of Cotabato and Davao was the Matanao River. The former native Davao Official near Cotabato is Datu Julian, Councilor of Sta Cruz who is still alive who had his territorial jurisdiction east of Matanao River. The living witnesses who can give light as to the traditional and tribal affinities of the natives living in Matanao River are Datus Matang and Damale.

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The importance of this very short speech could not be understated, and demands unpacking.

Datu Siawan put the border of Kidapawan and the neighbouring Davao province (under the municipalities respectively of Santa Cruz and Digos) at the Matanao River, west whereof was Kidapawan territory. This would mean Kidapawan’s historic territory extended all the way to what is today the Bansalan barangay of Marber.

His mention of ‘paying tributes’ is also tantalizingly eye-opening: paying tribute was historically not part of the Monuvu political system, as it is more associated with the Moros. If by this Datu Siawan meant the literal paying of tribute, then it implies that the datus of Kidapawan had established some form of suzerainty in the area before the coming of coloniality.

This suggestion is reflected by other sources: the late tribal historian Salomay Iyong recounts in the tribal history of the Manobo Apao Descendants Ancestral Domain of Mt Apo (MADADMA) Claim book the consolidation of power in the plains of Kidapawan, a consolidation the datus in the uplands had to recognize.

Central to this consolidation was Datu Ingkal, father of Siawan. This speech is the only official document to mention him, and it is also our only source of his appointment. But we can attest to his existence as two other sources independently confirm him: Salomay Iyong named him ‘Ingkal, son of Ugok,’ and in the 1979 genealogy handwritten by another late tribal historian, Datu Amado Pinantao, Ingkal Ugok is mentioned as one of the grandsons of Datu Ligue.

Until fairly recently, Datu Ingkal had been completely forgotten by much of Kidapawan, his memory cobbled together with that of his son Datu Siawan. There is a strong likelihood that Datu Ingkal street is named after him, not his son (who was sitting vice mayor when the street was named), but as no markers or documents explained the naming, the memorial did not serve its purpose. It has been one of my quiet triumphs to have revived his memory from obscurity.

The other details about him, however, not only offer valuable information but also raise further questions.

Datu Siawan puts the coming of the Americans in Kidapawan at the year 1908. This is a full two years since the two historic incidents that solidified American rule over Mindanao: the Battle of Bud Dajo, and much closer to Kidapawan the Huwes de Kutsilyo for Mangulayon. This two year delay implies the sheer inaccessibility of Kidapawan. Succeeding historical accounts indicate that the process of colonization in the Greater Kidapawan Area was a slow, drawn out process that lasted decades. One can argue that parts of the area would remain ‘precolonial’ as recently as the 1970s, as colonial contact in areas today belonging to the municipalities of Arakan and President Roxas would remain negligible.

The nature of Datu Ingkal’s appointment is also intriguing. ‘Capitan’ is not a known official designation in any of the local officials of American Mindanao. My speculation is that this was a Tribal Ward arrangement, with Datu Ingkal being made Tribal Ward Head (although undocumented, the gaping administrative hole in Mindanao around Monuvu territory would be filled if this was the case).

An even bigger mystery is this Col. Stevens that Datu Siawan mentions as appointing authority. As far back as I could trace, there is no ‘Col. Stevens’ in the administration of the Moro Province and the succeeding Department of Mindanao and Sulu. 

It must be noted that while American contact is mentioned here to have occurred first in 1908, the word Kidapawan itself does not appear in maps and colonial documents until 1914, when it was created a Municipal District.

Datu Siawan confirms in this statement that he was Municipal District President (a detail many other sources note), but this account is valuable as it puts his appointment year at the very beginning of the Municipal District’s history. If accounts from his family that he was born in 1896 were to be believed, then he would head the vast Municipal District when he was only 18.

This short but crucial bit of historiography was all but forgotten in Kidapawan until I uncovered it among the City Council archives in 2018. In the decades that followed Datu Siawan’s speech, inaccurate and downright false historical details had been circulated and printed by both local government and private institutions, indicating that Kidapawan’s many successive historians did not listen to Datu Siawan.

One of those historians was Lino Madrid, whose own account of Kidapawan history (the subject of this column’s previous article) while not contradictory to the Siawan account nevertheless implies an altogether different view of how the town was established. Whereas Siawan’s account reveals that governance in the Greater Kidapawan Area existed long before the coming of coloniality, Madrid strongly implied that governance only came with the coming of Settlers.

Madrid’s version dominated Kidapawan’s understanding of its own history in the decades that followed.

Now it is time to overturn that.

(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.)

On this Day in Kidapawan History

17 February, 1975 – the Notre Dame Broadcasting Corporation starts airing in Kidapawan under DXND. Today it is Kidapawan’s oldest radio station.

26 February, 1963 – Emma Gadi takes over the Municipality of Kidapawan as Mayor after ousting Alberto Madriguera in the first recorded cases of a successful electoral dispute in Kidapawan history

6 March, 1998 – A public conference of critics of cityhood was held at Caroland Café. There was resistance to cityhood, but the objections fell on deaf ears as the succeeding plebiscite ratified RA 8500 (converting Kidapawan into a city)

8 March, 1973 – the Kidapawan Municipal Council held an emergency session, the first recorded instance of such a session. Gunfight had erupted between government and rebel forces in Tulunan, Pigcawayan, and Maganoy, and there was fear the fighting might spill into Kidapawan. In the end the conflict did not reach the town, but the air of paranoia would linger for over a year.

12 March, 1965 – Four professors from Mexico, Professor Maria Mercedes Rivera Figueroa of the City University of Mexico, and Professors Gloria Iris Esperon Villavicencio, Marco Antonio Ramirez Luzurriaga, and Alberto Guantemoc Hernandez Roman of the University of Veracruz, came to Kidapawan as Ambassadors of Goodwill to promote the Spanish language, having been invited by Buenaventura Sabulao.

16 March, 1967 – A tornado destroyed buildings in the Kidapawan City Central Elementrary School (what would later be the Pilot Elementary School)

21 March 1988 – RA 8500, converting Kidapawan into a city, was ratified with 47% of the people of Kidapawan turning up to vote and 76% of these voters agreeing to making Kidapawan a city

28 March, 2000 – the Notre Dame for Girls became the Saint Mary’s Academy of Kidapawan. It had been running as an all-girls school autonomously from the Notre Dame of Kidapawan since 1976, and became a different co-ed school in 1994.

1 April, 2016 – The 2016 farmer’s rally in front of the Methodist Center turned violent, with four casualties recorded