Encountering the Negritos

When the Spanish colonizers first came to the islands just north of Indonesia, they had many unexpected encounters.

They could not have imagined, much to their disappointment, that they would again confront Muslim kings as they had expelled from Spain only years earlier.

Away from the Malay majority, up in the mountains, they were shocked to find a dark, diminutive people, curiously African in appearance, with many ancient customs they dismissed as anomalous and, to them, primitive and profitless.

They could not have expected quite the range of people they found, from kingdoms and sultanates to chiefdoms and loose 'acephalous' tribes.

They could not have expected that the mighty explorer Ferdinand Magellan would meet his end here, and certainly not at the hands of a primitive brown 'savage', named Lapu Lapu.

With a characteristically limited taxonomic nomenclature, they called the brown Muslim peoples "Moros" after the North Africans they had fought in the Spanish reconquista and proceeded to treat them likewise.

The black people, they called "Negritos" for their color and pygmy-like stature. And in conquering this vast archipelago, they would name these diverse nations after their king, Philip.

The so-called Negritos were not entirely misnamed. Scholars have always surmised that they were an ancient people who arrived in these islands from Africa millennia before their Malay neighbors. The means and time of their migration have long been subjects of speculation. These conclusions were first drawn simply by their appearance, resembling certain central African groups but also bearing some apparent relationship to a number of neighboring Negroid peoples in Oceania, Southeast Asia and the Andaman Islands. But modern genetic research is beginning to confirm earlier, less scientific suspicions.

The various black peoples of the Philippines, therefore, share a common heritage with ancestors far away in Africa, but also with Africans who arrived in Asia, perhaps as long as 20,000 years ago. They exist today surrounded by and interspersed with Malay Pilipino populations. This is a tenuous existence characterized by continued displacement by local, foreign, corporate and military interests, inevitable cultural and linguistic exchange, isolated pockets of cultural resistance and self-imposed seclusion, coercion and evangelization, and the poverty and destitution that naturally comes with such reversals and changes. Additionally, a series of natural disasters have had a devastating effect on the Negroid peoples of the Pacific, from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo to the 2004 tsunami that deluged the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and western Thailand. The Negritos of the Philippines and their counterparts throughout Southeast Asia are a people in crisis, far more so now than in the previous centuries. The modern world is quite literally closing in around them. And the loss of every indigenous people is the loss of countless data about the natural environment and how to preserve it and live in it; the loss of countless cures and remedies; the loss of countless subtle perspectives on the earth, the waters, the heavens and humanity; the loss of countless solutions to life's numerous conundrums and problems.