Rama: Si Lapulapu

He stands tall; 12 meters of bronze resolve. His hands carry a kampilan and taming. And his eyes – defiant and fixed on the horizon beyond Punta Engaño – seem to promise ne’er shall invaders trample thy sacred shore.

But as awe-inspiring and unifying as the 1981 statue of the country’s first hero is to a society longing to reclaim its pre-colonial identity, it is a work of fiction by an unnamed artist who had fewer facts about Lapulapu than we do now.

Prof. John Olivares of SWU, who says he has cracked the mystery of who made the Lapulapu bronze sculpture at the Mactan Shrine, in fact thinks the artist – an Ilongot-Ifugao – did not sign his work on purpose to dissociate himself from a glaring factual error.

More on this some other time.

What’s more pressing is the acute danger that what we know from our history books about Datu Lapulapu will be erased for future generations because of one person’s belief that the beloved hero and chieftain of Mactan’s entire existence is one big factual error.

And the harbinger of what could be Lapulapu’s departure from our collective memories is a movie about the Portuguese explorer who was slain by Lapulapu’s men on April 27, 1521. Magellan screens in cinemas on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025.

Magellan, the movie from director Lav Diaz, already circumnavigated the world. It premiered at Cannes and was followed by a global festival tour through Toronto, New York, Busan and Tokyo.

The film advances a bold historical frame that suggests that Lapulapu was an invention of Rajah Humabon. He didn’t exist.

Lapulapu, believes Diaz, was a fabricated adversary carefully imagined and constructed by Humabon to bait Magellan into pursuit and conflict; one that hopefully ends the three-vessel naval blockade of the Kingdom of Cebu.

On one hand, that a local sovereign is genuinely happy to convert into a foreign religion, vow fealty and pay tribute to a king he’d never met and not scream bloody murder is just not plausible. But this is what our colonial history taught us to believe. It’s what the Sinulog narrative provides.

It’s more plausible that Humabon, knowing that warfare would be costly, played along to earn the invaders’ trust, baited them with an opportunity for more conquest and then sicced them against his own enemy – a rival for the control of vital sea lanes – Lapulapu.

Everything will be in Humabon’s favor. If the enemy falls, he gets Mactan and is rid of invaders. If the invaders fall, as it did turn out, status quo ante. And while they’re busy fighting, Humabon would have more time to stage the May 1, 1521 massacre that killed 26 of Magellan’s remaining men, including his brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa.

It’s not unheard of and is, in fact, standard psychological warfare doctrine. Allied forces did this in WWII with Operation Fortitude. They made up a fake army unit and deployed it in a way that made Germans anticipate enemies at Pas-de-Calais, not Normandy.

But Magellan, the movie’s reframing goes beyond military deception and strategic misinformation. It ventures into historical revisionism, not on the basis and strength of new evidence, but by disregarding existing ones solely on doubt.

Diaz’s doubt on Lapulapu being real stems from there being no actual first-hand informational source proving his existence. A foolhardy premise, given the difficulty of proving a negative.

Indeed, a 1958 study on surviving local legends and oral histories about Lapulapu shows these to be a blend of fact and fiction and a 2016 journal research says the mythologizing continues in events like the Kadaugan sa Mactan.

However, neither of these disprove that Pigafetta, an eye-witness to the Battle of Mactan, affirmed in writing that a Lapulapu – written as Çilapulapu in “Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo” – existed as one of two leaders in the island.

If Lapulapu dies in history and Magellan finally gets his revenge 504 years later, we only have ourselves to blame. We did not truth-seek hard enough; we allowed the distortion of his reality to align with dominant propaganda, if only to feel pleased with ourselves.

But it is tempting to consider how, without a Lapulapu existing as Humabon’s foil, the Battle of Mactan is actually less of a clash of cultures, even less of an internal struggle between two rival chiefs, and more about the political thinking and political maturity of pre-colonial Cebu.

It makes us consider the level of political agency pre-colonial leaders like Humabon had in his time – his capacity to act and shape his society and its governance through the strength of his own will and the pursuit of his own goals, rather than being a passive recipient of power or external forces.

At a time when we face so many socio-economic and socio-political difficulties, and look upon local leadership that is itself in doubt, one cannot help but look at Humabon and say, how very sagacious of you, my dear Rajah.