Jose Rizal believed that Filipinos had rich culture and tradition before the Spanish

occupation. He attested to this theory when he discovered Dr. Antonio de

Morga’s Sucesos de la Islas Filipinas in Europe, wherein it contained the hand-copied
351 pages of the book with annotation of every chapter. The purpose of annotating
Morga’s Sucesos was to recover the lost history of the people of the Philippines and to
awaken their consciousness about the memories of their past which was obliterated and
falsified by the Spaniards. Rizal wanted to propose that the Philippines had its
civilization and culture before the Spanish came, and it was only destroyed and
demoralized during colonization. Since the Spanish embedded in the minds of the
Filipinos that the Philippines had no former civilization, Rizal refuted the claim by
making Morga’s Sucesos a tangible proof to attest that Filipinos lost their old traditions
when Spaniards occupied the country. The Spaniards made the Filipinos ashamed of
their own culture, which stripped off their true identity. They gave up their soul and
abandoned their ideologies to grasp other doctrines which they did not understand.
Ferdinand Blumentritt, along with Rizal, wrote a foreword to acknowledge some
significant points. He mentioned that the Filipino race was not inferior. Spaniards have
to correct their untrue justification that Filipinos were the children of limited knowledge
because the Filipinos were just denied of having their equal rights and opportunity to
head for a government and do other reforms. On the other hand, Rizal wanted to give
Filipinos their voice by entering into the point of view of Morga, and he answered him
by making annotations with the written document of the said conquistador.
The presence of today is the product of yesterday. Before attempting to question the
present, look at the past, and the past will answer you on why certain things are
happening in the present. If you want to know about something, your main instinct is to
investigate. Dr. Jose Rizal came up with this instinct and he discovered the past events
of the people of the Philippines when he read Morga’s document about the islands of
the Philippines. Since he was ignorant of the past, he needed to quote the testimony of
an illustrious Spaniard, who at the beginning of the new age controlled the Philippines
and had knowledge about the ancient culture and tradition in its last days. The study of
the past is an explanation of the future. The discovery of Morga’s Sucesos was one of
the most important discoveries in Philippine history due to its rarity, unbiased narrative
from the conquistador himself, and it is the only document wherein Morga clearly
described the Philippine set-up before the colonization. The annotation did by Rizal was
not just to answer erroneous narratives written by Morga about the Philippine culture,
but he also gave ancient Filipinos their voice to explain their side about ‘what and whys’
about their old customs and tradition.