Little black people

Early human migration as evidenced in mitochondrial DNA

Homo sapiens arrived in the Philippines in two waves, three if you count modern colonialism. In the first wave, which started around 70,000 years ago, the species slowly spread from the Horn of Africa along the southern coasts of Asia, living initially on what they could find on the beach. Sea levels were low enough in this period so that they could walk across to many parts of what is now the Philippines, where they probably settled around 23,000BC.

The second wave was very recent and much faster, and started around 5000 BC. Having descended from the highlands of Yunnan in Southern China to Taiwan, a people who spoke a language now "known" as Proto-Austronesian set out on large community boats to conquer not only the Malay Archipelago but the whole Pacific. New Zealand is their most recent destination and was first settled only in 800AD. These people obviously lived initially on what they could find in the sea.

There is a lot of uncertainty about the ensuing processes of language distribution, acculturation and intermarriage which have produced the present situation, where the vast majority of the inhabitants "are" Austronesians. As with the Indo-European expansions elsewhere, the traditional perception (based mainly on linguistic data) is that the "new people" largely supplanted the "original people" (orang asli in Malay) thanks to their superior technology for weaponry, transport and/or livelihood. The reality may be rather more intricate.

But in the Pacific, the Austronesians had the distinct advantage of being the first human settlers.

So in the Philippines today, the vast majority of inhabitants are "descendants" of the second wave. They speak Austronesian languages related to Malay. The Little Black People (as they were derogatorily called by the Spanish: negritos) have now dwindled to a few thousand in the Andamans, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, struggling to survive in marginal areas.

A "little black man" in a tree, presumably about to harvest a beehive

The best known of the Philippine negrito peoples are the Batak of the island of Palawan, who are incidentally not "the same as" or "related to" the Indonesian Batak.

In the run-up to the third, most recent wave of settlement, all the known and unknown lands West of a certain demarcation line were "given, granted, and assigned" (donamus, concedimus et assignamus) to Spain by Pope Alexander VI in the bull Inter caetera (1493). This bull has yet to be repealed, despite some recent demands made by Amerindian Catholics. The lands discovered to the West included the "Philippine" archipelago.

One interesting aspect of Spanish colonial society was its institutionalised racism, which served both to legitimize the slave trade and to define and protect the privileged status of the European colonists. Being white meant being born to rule; yet in colonial society there was an ever-growing contingent of people of ambiguous status because of their "mixed blood". So it became a vital task to lay down exactly how the different degrees of racial intermixing fitted into the overall social system.

For instance, the product of a white person and an indio was obviously non-white: the name invented for this was mixticius or mestizo. Diluted with another element of "purity", the child of a mestizo and a white person was a castizo. And according to some, a third dilution step (7/8) was enough to produce a full white, presumably on condition of a proper European upbringing.

Mixtures of black and white or black and indio were also accounted for, although no person with even a drop of black blood could ever qualify as a white, because the justification for the slave trade rested on defining Africans as subhuman, i.e. as animals. The orang asli were of course classified as black and assumed to have migrated from Africa.

There were literally hundreds of words for every imaginable "colour fraction". Noteworthy is that some of the grades with a black component were denoted by animal words: mulato (i.e. mule), coyote, lobo (i.e. wolf) etc.

This obsession with caste peaked in the late XVIIIc with the popularity of educational paintings visualising part of this "racial spectrum": pinturas de castas.

As in South America, the enduring legacy of colonialism in the Philippines is a high degree of racial prejudice, although conceptualized mostly in terms of actual skin colour, and a predictable obsession with whitening products.