During a TV Program, a famous gameshow host asked a contestant, who is a newscaster by profession, about what comes to mind when she hears the word, “Mindanao.” Like what I have suspected, this woman who is based in Manila, answered “giyera” (war). The reply is typical of the mindset these people. She could just have said, “Mount Apo” or “Rodrigo Duterte.” Instead, she chose what Patricio Abinales calls an “orthodoxy” when it comes to our thinking about Mindanao.
The condescension is partly due to our own attitude, practices, and perhaps, in the way certain things appear to be normalized in our institutions. For instance, provincial schools usually invite “experts” from the top schools in Manila and would feel so proud about them as guest speakers. It is seldom that Manila-based schools invite people from Mindanao, unless the same person is aligned to Manila-centric social and cultural agenda.
I will mention a story. There was this incident when a Mindanao-based professor who has outstanding credentials. He studied abroad. The person was to be fetched at the airport during an event. He received a text message telling him to get out of the terminal and look for the bus that was to fetch him. But after getting into the bus, the same person was made to wait for another hour because a guest from a top university in Manila is also arriving.
Voila, the bus moved and went near the exit of the terminal to fetch the next guest. It’s not that it is wrong to walk, but why not tell this speaker from Manila to do the same? See the difference? The problem is that whenever people from Mindanao get up there, say in terms of rankings, the same individual will be subjected to bias and prejudice. But when someone from a top-ranked school starts to say something, it is easy for many people to believe despite the fact that this person is simply using the good reputation of the institution where he is affiliated.
We are stuck in our colonial past and we continue to pay the price. It’s difficult to unmake this because if you look around, many of the school administrators here and elsewhere also studied in Manila. Menelito Mansueto, who wrote a book on decoloniality, is writing a direct challenge to imperialists in the capital who claim that they alone understand the meaning of the term. What an irony from the same intellectuals who want to get rid of a pathology only to apply it to their own fellow Filipinos.
In reality, there are individuals who just want to control everything when in truth they simply lack a sense of affirmation. In fact, the problem is not the condescending attitude. They are just suffering from so much insecurity because they have the need to pretend that they are the best even if that means nothing to anyone. The elites in mainstream Philippine politics have since lost their sense of pride after President Rodrigo Duterte won against his ilustrado opponents in 2016. Right now, the same people are moving heaven and earth to change the narrative when it comes to that legacy.
The above bias against Mindanao also affects higher education. In the provinces, there are usually one or two state universities that offer free college, which means that many young people are still hindered from getting the education they deserve. It is in the NCR where the majority of the funds for state colleges are poured in. But in outlier provinces, once a particular program reached its quota, a prospective enrollee is either “forced” to get into a different program or just enroll elsewhere.
The real problem is prohibitive tuition costs, which means that only upper middle classes can afford good private education. As a result, we are simply perpetuating a system that unjustly favors those already at the top. Dr. Rogelio Bayod has proposed that Mindanao must rethink its future. Not that it wants to be independent, but millions of people here, including Muslims and Lumads (Indigenous People), should be more conscious about the many decades of neglect. In the end, only our own choices can make our lives better.
