Sangkusing

The juxtaposition of “citizen” and “city” will try to remind us of a number of other words, familiar to us from daily usage, which are really derivatives of the Greek or Latin names for “city” such as “civitas,” and “polis.” Thus to be “civil” to someone is to treat him with the respect and regard with which a citizen treats a fellow-citizen; to be “urbane” is to have the good manners that may be expected of a city dweller; and this is the same as to be “polite.” “Police” comes from the same root as “polite,” although you may have had encounters with the police in which this was not immediately apparent. At any rate, the police is that body of men upon whose vigilance, courage and integrity the good order of the city depends.

What the police enforce is the “civil” law, the law of the citizen, the law to which city people freely subject themselves. This they do because they are “civilized”; because, unlike barbarians, who respect only force, they have learned to live under law; and this they have learned by living together in peace in the city. Living together thus, cheek-by-jowl to one another in a relatively limited area, they have also learned to govern themselves, and so take part with great gusto in the process by which they form, dissolve, reconstitute, supervise, control and clean up their own government – the process familiar to us all under the name of “politics.”

If these derivatives of the word for city suggest anything, it is surely that men have generally have found great advantages in being part of a city; that many of the good things they enjoy they owe to their city; and hence that their city is something worthy of their loyalty and love. And so we see that before there was love of one’s fatherland, or patriotism, there was love of one’s city, or citizenship; the first was, historically, merely the extension of the second. Indeed, the ancient Greeks identified what we would now call a nation, or the state with the city; they found it difficult to conceive of a nation or state larger than a city. I believe it was Aristotle who said that a state should not be so big that you could not walk from one end of it to the other in a single day. The thinking behind this was that what binds the people of a state together is mutual respect, esteem  and affection; and how can you love someone you do not know?

Manila is a city with a great past. This year, we celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Manila as a Spanish city. But the history of Manila goes back much further than that, so far back that we cannot set a definite date for the founding of the Tagalog citadel on the site of which the Spanish conquerors built Fort Santiago.

Of that citadel, the first Spanish captain ever to set eyes on it, Goiti, said that “it was situated on the bank of the river,” and was “defended by a palisade all along its front. Within it were many warriors, and shore outside was crowded with people” – the civilian population, presumably, who could not be prevented from rushing out of the citadel to gape at these strangers from the West. Trust Manilenos to break through police lines whenever there is a site to be seen! At the same time, Goiti continues – pieces of artillery stood at the gates, guarded by bombardiers, linstock in hand.” So there was someone in authority in the city who thought it prudent to take precautions.

We know who this someone was – a young rajah named Sulayman, whom we can picture standing very straight before Captain Goiti and saying to him what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first recorded speech of a Manileño – a speech recorded for that reason, and also because it was so unexpectedly short. As Goiti reports it, Sulayman said “that he was pleased to be the friend of the Spaniards; but . . . that (they) should understand that he would not tolerate any abuse . . .; on the contrary; they would repay with death the least thing that touched their honor.”

We would be hard put to it, I think, to find a briefer or a better statement of the foreign policy of this country that these words of the Gatpuno of Maynila whose name has gone down to us. Perhaps the Department of Foreign Affairs should inscribe its substance on Romblon marble in its Hall of Banners

WE ARE PLEASED TO BE A FRIEND OF ALL NATIONS; BUT THEY SHOULD UNDERSTAND THAT WE WILL NOT TOLERATE ANY ABUSE; ON THE CONTRARY WE WILL REPAY WITH DEATH THE LEAST THING THAT TOUCHES OUR HONOR.

It seems to be our fate – tragic or comic, depending on your point of view – to express our most notable sentiments, in words most worthy of remembrance, only on the eve of disasters and defeat. So it was with Rizal’s “Ultimo Adios”; so it was with Sulayman. Not many days after that first encounter, Goiti razed Tagalog Manila to the ground; and not many months later, Legaspi founded Spanish Manila on its ashes.

We can look at that first conquest of Manila as a defeat, because it was. We can also look upon it as an enrichment, because this is also true. The Spanish conquistador, no less than the Indonesian pioneer and the Chinese trader who came before him, no less than the British merchants and the American proconsul who came after him, made his distinctive and valued contribution to the city that we know and love.

Why should we deny it? We should be proud of it; proud of the fact that she, Sultana of the Pasig, has stood at the crossroads of many different cultures, and taken from each a strand that she has woven into a fabric of her own unique personality; so that we can say of her what the poet said of Cleopatra of Egypt, that “time cannot dim,nor custom stale her infinite variety.”

So fascinating is the history of Manila that I have often thought what a fine thing it would be if the centenary of 1971 could be made the occasion for publishing a well documented narrative of the city’s development written by Filipino scholars. I first thought of it in 1961, when we had ten years to complete the work; unfortunately, the project came to nothing. It has occurred to me since what perhaps is needed is not so much a history of a historical novel. History books are notoriously dull; to make the past come alive, you need the creative writer. Best of all, perhaps, would be to persuade an imaginative photographer, of whom we have not a few, to collaborate with one of our major writers on an illustrated text.

But the past is prologue merely, as we are told often enough; our concern must be always with the present – with the great, bustling, sprawling, strident, sleepless, multi-faceted metropolis of three million souls, in which Sulayman’s citadel occupies but one corner of a quiet shrine dedicated to the National Hero. It is to this Manila that we belong, to her that we owe our loyalty and service.

It will be objected at this point that our loyalty and service should be to the nation as a whole, and not to any single part of it. Do we not often say to foreigners that Manila is not the Philippines, and that it is dangerous to dogmatise about our country on the basis of a few days’ or a few week’s assiduous drinking in a Manila bar? 

Manila is where most of our industry is concentrated, but the Philippines as a whole is not industrial but agricultural, with a population overwhelmingly rural, not urban. Manila is where most of the country’s wealth is concentrated, and consequently where all the comforts and conveniences that wealth commands are to be found. But the Philippines as a whole, is a nation of poverty-stricken peasants; people who live just at the margin of existence, of any kind of existence, that is, that can reasonably be called human; for them, the comforts and conveniences of affluence are simply inaccessible.

All this is true; nobody can deny it. But look at it another way. If Manila is the furthest point in economic and social development that this country has reached, and therefore not really represented of our average performance; it is also, by that very token, where most if no all the problems encountered in the process of development are to be found, and that in their acutest form. Problems of unemployment and underemployment; problems of overpopulation and undernourishment; problems that add up to a single but massive problem – poverty – grinding, brutalizing poverty – desperate poverty made more desperate, if that were possible, because it sprawls just a few streets away from some of the most glittering golden ghettos east of Suez.

If Manila is not the Philippines, neither is it only the well-groomed subdivisions on its periphery. It is also North Harbor; it is also the barong-barongs of Binondo; it is also the squatters’ shanties along the railroad tracks, thrust like a steel stiletto into its very heart.

Look at it this way. If we are given sometime to make a beginning of solving our national problem of poverty, where can we best make that beginning if not here? For if the nation’s wealth, industry, and business enterprise are concentrated here, precisely because of that, it is also here that the best managerial and entrepreneurial talent is gathered together.

The leadership, then, is here for any kind of planned and organized attack on the problems that depress more than half of the population of Manila below the level of life consistent with human dignity. If any kind of expertise is needed in any of the sciences of social reform and reconstruction, there, almost within a stone’s throw of each other, are the universities, the communities of scholars, the institutions of higher learning and research. And if what is required is willing hands and hearts to carry out concentrated efforts at community development and urban resettlement, there are the student bodies of these same institutions, the campuses from which increasing numbers of generous young men and women volunteer their summer vacation, and even their week-end holidays, towards one form or another of social action.

And finally, look at it like this. The poor of Manila, the poor who look to you for leadership, are not a different breed of men. They are fellow Filipinos. Their fathers fought in the countless battles for freedom that weave a blood-red stripe into the pattern of our four hundred years of history.

They are Filipinos. It is not charity they ask for. It is justice. Justice; their just share of that equality of opportunity, of those blessings of freedom, that are our common heritage. If they are ignorant, shiftless, unreliable, improvident, do not be quick to say that they are so by nature. Change first the iniquitous social system that effectively prevents them from being anything else; prevents them from acquiring the skills that will make them employable by industry, refuses honest compensation for honest work; places them at the mercy of the userer and extortioner; offers them, in certain extremities, no practicable choice but to break the law in order to survive. Change the system; give them half the chance to show of what mettle they are made; and then say of them what you will.

They are Filipinos. The breed of men that fought our Revolution, and had first to win the weapons with which to fight it. The breed of men that fought the foreign ruler because they passionately believed that under their own leaders, leader of their own kind, they would have a better chance for a fuller chance for themselves and their posterity.

And now what they had hoped for has come to pass. They live under their own leaders in a sovereign republic. And they look to these leaders, for a share of that freedom they had helped to win.