Philippines Redux 1: Fort Santiago--An Interpretation

Just before I left Manila, I went to the old section of Manila, Intramuros, which dates back to the beginning of Spanish colonization in the 1500s. There is an old Spanish fort here, Fort Santiago, guarding the banks of the Pasig River, around which Manila first developed. First built in 1571, I see Fort Santiago as a sort of symbol of the Philippines' long history of imperial conquests--as well as its resiliency leading to the independence struggle of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The gate to Fort Santiago

The site of Fort Santiago pre-dates the arrival of Spaniards, having served as the fortress of Malay ruler Raja Soliman. This reminds us (me!) that despite the long Spanish presence in the Philippines, the archipelago's history as a part of the wider Malay world stretching across Southeast Asia reaches far into the past. After the Spanish defeated Raja Soliman, they built Fort Santiago, which was completed in 1571. Damaged in earthquakes and attacks over the next two hundred years, the fort took its current form by 1778.

The sculpture above the gate depicts Saint James (Santiago in Spanish), the patron saint of the Spanish state, who was associated with the defeat of Muslims. This provides a useful opportunity to point out that the conquest of the Philippines and the Americas was part and parcel of the creation of Spain as a state--symbolized most poignantly in the fact that Columbus' landing in the Americas and the Spanish conquest of Grenada both occurred in 1492. The sculpture portrays of Spanish rule in the Philippines as another theater for an anti-Muslim reconquista, though the importance of Manila to Spain had a slightly more pecuniary interest. After the discovery of vast reserves of silver in current Mexico and Bolivia, Manila served as the way station for Spanish galleons bearing silver back to Spain and for trade with Ming Dynasty China and various Indian and Southeast Asian states. Manila was the linchpin of the first truly global economic network.

Since the 1570s, Fort Santiago has witnessed and symbolized the different colonial regimes governing the Philippines. Fort Santiago first changed hands during the often-forgotten British occupation of Manila from 1762-1764--a reminder that what Americans remember as the "French and Indian War" was in fact part of what Winston Churchill called the "First World War," the Seven Years' War of 1754-63, which involved all the European powers and their colonies in Europe, the Americas, South and Southeast Asia. Britain returned Manila to Spain as part of the negotiations to end the War.

Statue of Rizal in the cell where he spent his final night.

In addition to the imperial realignments, Fort Santiago also hosted an important factor in the creation of Philippine nationalism. In the latter part of Spain's rule, the fort served as a prison, and its most famous prisoner was Jose Rizal. Rizal, a prolific writer and polymath, severely criticized the Spanish colonial regime and proposed reform in the relationship between Spain and the archipelago (another useful reminder that, like in the United States, anticolonial revolution rarely began with demands for independence!). Falsely accused of cooperating with more radical nationalists who rose up against Spain in 1896, Rizal was imprisoned en route to serve as a doctor in Cuba. Returned to Manila and imprisoned in Fort Santiago, Rizal was shot just outside the fortress on December 30, 1896. As with Jose Marti in Cuba, Spain made a martyr-hero out of Rizal, just before losing control.

Modern Manila, stretching out on the opposite bank of the Pasig River.

Also like Marti's Cuba, the United States swooped into the vacuum left by Spain to dominate the Philippines for the next fifty years, and beyond. In the aftermath of the failed 1896 revolt, the U.S. defeat of Spain in 1898 seemed to offer what Rizal had inspired the revolutionaries to fight for: Philippine independence, but the United States instead occupied the Philippines and governed it from 1898 to 1946--after a bloody war of occupation fought from 1899 to 1902. The U.S. military used Fort Santiago as its headquarters during the American occupation.

But before Philippine independence in 1946, another imperial overlord passed through Fort Santiago. When Japan invaded and occupied the Philippines from 1942 to 1945, Japanese forces used Fort Santiago as a prison for captured U.S. forces and Philippine guerrillas. Like the rest of Manila, Fort Santiago was almost entirely destroyed by the Battle of Manila between U.S. and Japanese forces in 1945, and rebuilt by the independent Philippine government.

Manila Cathedral, seen from Fort Santiago. First built in 1581, its current building dates from the 1950s.

There is great truth, and hope, in that last fact: despite the utter destruction wreaked on the Philippines by the Second World War, the latest in a series of imperial battles which caught the Philippines in the middle, Filipinos have proven resilient, and rebuilt. Like Jose Rizal, outlasting the forces of destruction which tried to extinguish him and the independence of the Philippines, the Philippines and Filipinos persist, survive, and rebuild.

As a Christian, I don't want to play up this metaphor too much, lest one idolize and deify a nation rather than God. I see it as a picture, a reflection, of a greater Resurrection, of life triumphing over what seemed like the darkest of defeats.


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The video for today is more somber than usual, but it reflects the sobriety of violence and war. Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" is the piece of literature most associated with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, but an equally important one is Mark Twain's "The War Prayer," which reminds us to face squarely and honestly the consequences of war, and of associating particular political projects with God's name.