The Cebu City Government website already pulled out its ‘History’ section after I called the attention of my good friend Louie Nacorda last Monday over the site’s explanation that the Cebu comes from the word Sebo or animal fat.
I am sure that Louie, who sits in the Cebu City Cultural and Historical Affairs Commission (CHAC), almost fell off the chair when he himself saw the website. After a few calls, Louie intimated that this part of the website was apparently made way back in 2007. And so other blogs and tour sites simply copied it.
Someone in 2007 did not do his or her homework. “Sebo” is Spanish for animal fat or tallow. It is totally illogical why Humabon’s settlement, even before the Spanish arrived, had been named in Spanish and after, of all things, the lard or fat of some pork or animal. What gives? Why this penchant to invent?
Tracing place names took a bizarre turn when the Bureau of Public Education (now Department of Education) asked all teachers all over the country way back in the 1960s (if I am not mistaken) to constitute themselves into a committee and carry what a very noble and important data gathering activity that has now come to be known as the Historical Data Papers or HDP. This antedates the current wave of cultural mapping of all towns and cities.
Replete with both historic and folkloric accounts as well as lists of every town’s important persons and events, these papers were also predicated by stories as to how the town got its name.
Many a poor teacher, usually the chair of the committee, unable to trace his or her town’s name ostensibly came up with this most illogical of events: A small group of Spanish soldiers chance upon, say, a group of natives walking along the same path they are in, for example. They ask the group what the name of the place was and the natives answer back. Their answer then becomes the name of the town. How the natives, who would have scampered away in fear upon seeing uniformed strangers carrying firearms, were able to understand Spanish boggles the mind, does it?
In another scene, let’s take the example of Alegria, because this used to be accepted as the reason for the town’s name. The Spanish soldiers, so the story goes, chanced upon a merry group of women washing clothes at a spring which still exists to this day. Hiding in the bushes so as not to disturb them, the soldiers see that these women are so happy but with their chores, laughing all the time. Thus the Spaniards decide to name the town Alegria, after saying to themselves, “Que alegre!” (So happy!).
That the spring in this story still exists to this day makes one think that this must be a real event. In truth, Alegria used to be called Barrio Tuburan. When it became a town, there already existed another town up north by that name. And so the Spanish authorities selected Alegria, perhaps for a Spanish town in the Basque countryside, the province where many Spaniards in the Philippines came from.
I suspect this Cebu as ‘Sebo’ has to do with this kind of invention via storytelling. Traditionally, however–and if only the website writer carried out diligent research—he or she would have found out that Cebu in Humabon’s time was called Zubu by Magellan’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, a European corruption of Sugbu. The absence of ‘g’ in Zebu or Zubu, the early Spanish names for Cebu, is probably due to the conquerors’ difficulty to hear or pronounce the hard ‘g’ in the middle of a word.
Until today, we still refer to ourselves as Sugbuanon because that has always been who we are since time immemorial. I have never heard anyone say he or she is Seboanon. That should have signaled the researcher to imagine where the word Sugbu or its modern rendition, Sugbo, comes from and not resort to inventing Sebo, an obviously Spanish word.
The jury is still out as to etymology of Sugbu is. But the generally accepted one is that it means to get out of one’s boat in order to wade in shallow water, in reference to the port of Humabon’s settlement. It is, like many place-names in the Philippines, a reference to its geographic condition or location. Many places like Dumanjug, from the word ‘Danhug’ or ‘Danhugan’ or Boljoon, from ‘Bolho’ or Ilihan, from Ili are named in the same manner. Others, like Argao and Dalaguete (for Dalakit or Dakit) are named after plants or trees where people used to meet perhaps to barter.
So the next time one is confronted with questions like how your place came to be named as such in Cebu, stop referring to the invented encounter between Spanish soldiers and natives. Think hard if a geographic formation or some plant or animal species that you know of may be the reason. And when in doubt, there is always the Cebuano Studies Center at the Talamban Campus of the University of San Carlos, where you can do diligent research.