Central Mindanao folk to witness biggest royal wedding since the 1970s

COTABATO CITY , Philippines   – A daughter of Maguindanao Rep. Didagen Dilangalen will marry tomorrow a datu who belongs to an equally influential Moro clan in what local contemporary historians tout as the biggest and most historic political fusion ever of Central Mindanao’s ilod (downstream) and raya (upstream) royal principalities.

The region last witnessed a big royal wedding in the late 1970s when Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman and his wife, Bai, who belongs to Marawi’s Pacasum clan, were married. Maranaws feasted for nearly a week in Lanao del Sur and Marawi City.

An erstwhile spokesman of former President Joseph Estrada, Dilangalen, himself a key member of a big royal clan in Maguindanao’s northern Kabuntalan town, is the only non-administration congressman in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), where political opposition is virtually non-existent.

The wedding of Dilangalen’s daughter, Bai Donna, to Datu Jeng Ampatuan Macapendeg, was arranged last month by elders of both clans according to the centuries-old Moro tradition of facilitating intermarriages meant to bond together royalties involved in governance.

Macapendeg is a nephew of ARMM Gov. Datu Zaldy Ampatuan, whose father, former Maguindanao governor Datu Andal Ampatuan Sr., is regarded by residents in all of Maguindanao’s more than 30 towns as the political patriarch of the province.

“This event shall be written as the biggest and most dramatic intermarriage between the royalties to which the Dilangalens and the Ampatuans belong,” said historian-writer Bapah Haron Felmin, assistant tourism secretary of the ARMM.

Felmin, author of the recently published “Cultural Jewels of Moro Mindanao,” a book detailing the genealogies of the royal families and sultanates in the autonomous region since the 13th century, said as a matter of tradition, datus in Maguindanao arrange the marriages of their children not only for political solidarity, but also to ensure the spread of their bloodlines, mostly from 600-year Shariff Kabunsuan ancestry.

Shariff Kabunsuan was an Arab-Malay prince from Johore, an island now under the sovereignty of Malaysia, who set foot in the 14th century at the Bucana area (now the chartered Cotabato City) to spread Islam in mainland Mindanao.

Kabunsuan sired several children with his Maguindanaon, Iranon and Maranaw wives, from whom sprang the royal Moro clans in what are now the provinces of Lanao del Sur, Lanao del Norte, Maguindanao, and North Cotabato, the South Cotabato-Sarangani-General Santos City (Socsargen) area, and Marawi City.

“This Dilangalen-Macapendeg kalilang (wedding) can even be labeled as the decade’s biggest and well-celebrated Moro royal wedding in Mindanao,” said another contemporary historian here, Dr. Ramon Rabago Jr., a ranking officer of the Philippine Medical Association’s local chapter.