The Moro South on Fire
/Book Review: Moro Warrior
By Thomas McKenna
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2022
For a start, the author Thomas McKenna’s vivid description of Mindanao’s geography carries has the mark of an explorer’s meticulous accuracy. One can tell that he has put his heart into it; he’s been there and knows it like the palm of his hand; that the land carries as much weight as the people. It transports me to a place I thought I had known so well, but apparently not enough to catch the ambiguities of its contours.
This book is largely about the bond between a Moro boy, Mohammad Adil, and his American teacher, Edward Kuder, and their kinship spanning the years of colonialism through the Japanese invasion in World War II. Their lives and loves turn the quilt into a mural with which a reader can touch the breadth of Mindanao.
We follow the story of Adil, who steals fifteen pesos from his father to escape to the bottom island of Sulu, to be one of the boys in Kuder’s boarding school house. Through their eyes, and the devastation of the world around them, we learn of the history that bound the Muslims and the Americans against the common Japanese enemy. It is a symbiosis that hasn’t been broken to present-day Mindanao. The book tells us what we have long suspected; that there has been more love for the Americans than for the Filipinos of the north; that Mindanao would probably have been better off standing on its own as country separate from the entire archipelago. The fate of the Muslims steadily dimmed after the U.S. granted Philippine independence in 1946, and in the many years of postwar conflict.
Adil (front left) from 1943 just before he went off to war (Photo courtesy of the Adil Family)
In dissecting Kuder’s personal mission, apart from his job as colonial superintendent of schools – a novel-worthy biography that McKenna dug up from hidden letters and library materials – an avatar emerges for those who have felt compelled to see Mindanao fulfill its promise. I had a strain of that “mission” myself, which I thought I had inherited from my father, an Ilocano who raised us in the Zamboanga peninsula. I wished that I, too, had been around to see Kuder create the legacy he wanted so desperately for Mindanao.
I envy McKenna for finding his true Moro warrior in the boy Adil, who would be a guerrilla fighter, exemplifying the Moro resistance that provided the backbone to remnants of the American military holding out in Mindanao. Moro Warrior brings to light the Muslims’ heroism without which Gen. Douglas MacArthur, running U.S. military operations from his exile in Australia, could have lost a key link toward his promised “return” to the Philippines whose Commonwealth-era armed forces he had commanded.
I had stopped reading books on Mindanao after I finished writing The Battle of Marawi (2020), having reached a point of fatigue. But McKenna’s book, whose Philippine edition published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press I received during the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2022, revived a nostalgia and a certain sense of responsibility when talking about the plight of Mindanao. The book’s most compelling gift is that it is written through the lens of a cultural anthropologist, reminiscent of the late H. Arlo Nimmo’s works on the Sulu archipelago.
At last, in the course of McKenna’s narration, everything makes sense to me: the family ridos (clan feuds); the homegrown devotion to Sufism; how weapons proliferated; the fighting technique that brought about pintakasi (although it wasn’t called that, then); and how displacement became a way of life, leading to the etymological root of the term bakwit. Heck, I got teary-eyed just reading the short paragraphs describing the sound of the bronze kulintang gongs.
The Moro ranks in the Bolo Battalion spelled the difference for the anti-Japanese resistance in the South, but the crocodile in the Liguasan marsh should be a symbolic reminder that there were also traitors in their midst. (In that connection, why was a major town named after the biggest traitor of them all?) The setbacks Moros would suffer in the future stem from these families’ self-interest as much as from the Filipinos of the north’s aim of “colonizing” the Muslim south after the war.
The book shows how Americans who stayed behind in Mindanao, disobeying orders to surrender to the Japanese, built a corridor of a Free Philippines despite their deceptive ways. The story of the Moro Warrior is not done yet: a sequel to this book should cover more years of fighting in the aftermath of WWII, and other wily and ruthless protagonists and pretenders.
For more specific military aspects, a complementary but grueling read would be Cesar Pobre’s and Ricardo Jose’s Guerilla Days in the South 1942-1945 (published by the Philippine Veterans Affairs Office, 2022), in which the authors highlight the exploits of Kuder’s most prominent pupil – Salipada Pendatun (who had also taken Adil under his wing). Pendatun’s Bolo Battalion stretched his command from Cotabato to as far as Bukidnon province, recording successful guerilla battles against Japanese garrisons.
Kuder and Pendatun (Source: Philippines Free Press)
Pendatun was a threat to the leadership of the self-appointed American general Wendell Fertig, also a colorful figure in Moro Warrior, who mustered the guerilla forces in Lanao province (where Adil fought) and the Misamis Oriental corridor, and who was eventually appointed by MacArthur to lead the 10th Military District of the resistance. He was the guy that MacArthur couldn’t avoid, a character that was his mirror image (MacArthuresque, as McKenna coined it). Pendatun wouldn’t defer to Fertig’s command, until he was made to do so against his better judgment.
Adil (standing right) and family from 1945, just after he got back (Photo courtesy of the Adil Family)
Pendatun, too, was known as “the general,” though he was officially ranked as a mere lieutenant. Both McKenna’s and Pobre/Jose’s books reveal the dynamics and rivalries of the leaders. Pendatun’s fighters led the famous siege of Malaybalay in Bukidnon, where the Japanese POW camp was located, and this story alone is the stuff of legend that Pendatun, who did have American officers under his command, would later cultivate.
War is not a stranger to the people of Muslim Mindanao, who had gone through years of fighting during the Spanish and Americans colonializations. But in the war against the Japanese Muslims of different ethnic groups fought together against a bigger enemy, showing that the resistance did not flourish only in Luzon or the Visayas, that Mindanao, too, was a hotbed of patriotism.
From Thomas McKenna: The Battle of Tamparan and the Forgotten Moro Heroes of World War II — Positively Filipino | Online Magazine for Filipinos in the Diaspora
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
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