For centuries, Kabun Suan’s ancestors sailed off in their outriggers at the first sign of trouble or wars on shore. But the landlubbers finally caught up with the sea gypsies.
Kabun, born on a splendidly carved houseboat somewhere in the Sulu Sea, is likely to die in one of the cardboard shanties on stilts that regional authorities used to lure him and other sea gypsies onto dry land “for their own good and an education.”
In reality, the officials want the sea gypsies to pay taxes and vote in hotly contested elections in Mindanao, where Muslims and Christians are vying for control. Extremists from both sides have killed travelers in recent weeks, raising the specter of a holy war.
Muslims provided Kabun’s shack at Rio Hondo, and he now prays at the 14th Century mosque instead of sacrificing fish to tribal gods of the sea and the sky. His friend, Salim, lives in a shanty on Christian land and prays at a Catholic shrine across the road from the mosque.
Although illiterate and with no concept of democracy, both men and their wives registered to vote -with disappointing results for their sponsors.
“We registered all of the (gypsies), but during the elections last year only a few of them voted,” complained Amil Pasasampang, a Muslim elder. “We couldn’t find the rest. They wander about like nomads, and they have no sense of time.”
Kabun talks little and, like most of his people, has no idea how old he is. They may be the last generation of badjaos, or nomads, which anthropologists have hailed as the true children of the sea.
“Maybe less than a few hundred still live like their forefathers,” said Carlos Bandaying, who as the head of the Muslim Affairs Office also looks after ethnic minorities.
The rest, perhaps 100,000 by Bandaying’s estimate, live in shanty towns. Many have made their way to Manila where they beg for money. There are no government programs to educate or train them.
The badjaos are animists who once spent their lives on houseboats roaming the seas. They can tell the speed of a current by dipping a finger in the water to gauge the temperature, they sail at night on pure instinct, and they bury their dead in boats rigged with a sail so the corpse can navigate its way to the next world.
In 1521, the explorer Magellan wrote about “people who always live on their vessels and have no houses on land.”
But after a millennium on the ocean, the growing threat from pirates-who often robbed and terrorized the defenseless gypsies-and the advent of commercial pearl harvesting in traditional fishing grounds drove the badjaos to seek shelter.
“We stayed longer and longer (on the land),” Kabun said.
In the early 1980s, the government of then-President Ferdinand Marcos launched a settlement program. It offered the gypsies seaside huts built on stilts over shallow lagoons on Jolo and Basilan islands and around Zamboango on the western tip of Mindanao.
Authorities also offered the gypsies voter registration cards-the equivalent of citizenship.
Friendly by nature and intimidated by the more aggressive landlubbers, the blandishments of civilization have proved near fatal to the badjaos.
Many have sold their houseboats, prized by tourists as South Sea artifacts, and become ragged beggars in Manila.
Last year, Kabun sold the boat his father had built, with its colored square sail and carvings of the gods, to an Australian tourist who had it taken apart and shipped home.
Now, most evenings just before dusk, Kabun and his wife Tusnia paddle a rickety plywood boat to the terrace of the Lantaka Hotel. Hands out, they beg for money from tourists sipping cocktails.
At the nearby port, their five children dive all day for coins tossed from inter-island ferries by passengers eager to find out if badjaos really can stay underwater for as long as five minutes.
Many of the badjao have been recruited by criminal syndicates who pay their way to Manila and then put them to work begging.
A woman who said her name was Luisa said she still was repaying 1,000 pesos ($40) that “the boss” loaned her four years ago for a ferry ticket from Jolo. “But the boss lets me keep some money to buy food for me and the children,” she said.
Bandaying said the gypsies pay back the same loans over and over again.
The rest of the gypsies live at the bottom of a social ladder in a class-conscious tribal society that sees them as lazy or as curiosities to be exploited as a tourist attraction. Their passiveness is seen as weakness, their dark skins and sun-bleached hair as a sign of inferior breeding.
“You can always tell badjaos because they walk in single file,” said Pasasampang. “In the old days you would come across their boats all sailing in line like a Bedouin caravan in the desert.”
