Notes on Kalayaan, the Katipunan paper^[1]

Prior to Kalayaan coming out in March 1896, according to Pio Valenzuela, the Katipunan’s membership had reached only about 300 in four years, but once the paper began to circulate the association attracted new thousands of new adherents.  By the outbreak of the revolution in August, he estimates, it had 20,000 or even 30,000 members.^[2]

Nobody knew the exact membership figures, of course, and nobody today can weigh the impact of Kalayaan against other eventualities that added to the gathering momentum of the Katipunan in the early months of 1896 – more vigorous and open recruitment; more frequent meetings in Manila and beyond; and the consequent fact that the Spanish authorities, well before the “discovery” of the association by Padre Mariano Gil of Tondo in mid-August, had tightened their surveillance and persecution of suspected “filibusteros” and thereby provoked a further escalation of bitterness and anger.  

But whatever the true measure of Kalayaan’s contribution to this swelling tide of events, the paper has its own intrinsic importance.  Not only was it the first publication of the Katipunan prior to August 1896, it was also the last.   Produced and circulated on the brink of the revolution, its pages, and its pages alone, carried in print the message of liberty the three top-ranking leaders of the Katipunan – Bonifacio, Jacinto and Valenzuela – wanted the people, the bayan, to hear and to heed.  

Production of the paper

Prior to 1896, it seems, the Katipunan did not publish any propaganda materials.  The association did have a printing press^[3], but its capacity was low, and the extensive or protracted use of any other press, it may be presumed, was feared to run too high a risk of betrayal and discovery.  A few documents, such as membership forms and the sheets bearing the questions initiates had to answer (“¿Ano ang kalagayan nitong Katagalugan nang unang panahun?” etc.) were reportedly printed clandestinely on the presses of the Spanish daily Diario de Manila, but these documents were small in size and limited in quantity.  In 1895, however, a better press was purchased for the Katipunan by two members from Kalibo, Francisco del Castillo and Candido Iban, who had recently returned to the Philippines after working as shell and pearl divers in Australia and had some money from a lottery win.  They bought the press and a small quantity of type from Antonio Salazar’s “Bazar El Cisne” on Calle Carriedo, and Del Castillo transported it to the house of Andres Bonifacio in the Santa Cruz district of Manila.  

Valenzuela recalls that after being elected as Fiscal (Tagausig) of the Supreme Council in December 1895 he told Bonifacio that he would accept the position “on condition that he would give me the printing press of the Katipunan, which he had in his house, so that I could direct and edit a monthly review, which was to be the organ of the Katipunan.”  Bonifacio agreed, and in mid-January 1896 the press was transferred to Valenzuela’s residence at 35 Lavezares in San Nicolas.  To assist with the actual printing, Valenzuela recruited two of his town mates from Polo, Bulacan - Ulpiano Fernandez, who earned his living as a printer with the paper El Comercio, and Faustino Duque, a student at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran.

After making these arrangements, however, Valenzuela very soon decided that he “had no time to take charge of the printing” because of his commitments as a physician and a Katipunan organizer.  Nor, apparently, did he retain much of his “directing” role.  Responsibility both for producing and for editing Kalayaan then passed to Emilio Jacinto, who went to the house on Lavezares after his pre-law classes at the Universidad de Santo Tómas.   On the production side, the main problem was a shortage of type.  Wishing to compose the paper in accord with the new Tagalog orthography that disdainful Spaniards called “Germanized” (“alemanizada”), the printers lacked in particular the letters “k” and “w”, and also “h”, “y” and the common vowels.  Jacinto was obliged to ask his mother, Josefa Dizon, for P20 so that he could buy type from Isabelo de los Reyes, who owned a printing press, and Valenzuela bought and begged some more from employees of the press of the Diario de Manila.  Even then, Valenzuela recalls, there was only enough type to set one page at a time, and the laborious process of setting all eight pages took two months to complete.  Though dated January 1896 on its masthead, the paper did not finally appear until about the middle of March.

Valenzuela states that 2,000 copies were printed, but Epifanio de los Santos puts the figure at just 1,000, of which 700 were distributed by Andres Bonifacio in Manila and the surrounding towns, 200 in Cavite by Emilio Aguinaldo and the other 100 by Pio Valenzuela in Bulacan.  

A second issue was then planned.  KKK members were urged to submit contributions, but in practice, Valenzuela says, Emilio Jacinto wrote the issue single-handedly.  Then the production process was bedeviled by the continuing shortage of type and by acute fears that the press would be discovered.  Toward the end of June 1896 the press was moved out of Valenzuela’s house on Lavezares to another house on the same street where his town mates Faustino Duque and Ulpiano Fernandez watched over it, and when the Katipunan was exposed in mid-August it was moved again, to the house of Alejandro Santiago a block north, at 6 Clavel.  Soon afterwards, Duque subsequently related, he and Fernandez received a tip-off that the Spanish dragnet was closing in, and “without losing a single minute, (we) destroyed the press, the tools, the types and the moulds.  We also burned the papers.”^[4]   Still lacking its eighth and final page, the second issue of Kalayaan went up in flames, and the pieces Jacinto had written never appeared.

Physical appearance

Judging from Valenzuela’s recollections, the pages of Kalayaan measured about 9 inches across and 12 inches tall, slightly larger than the A4 paper size of today.  As just mentioned, his memoirs state unequivocally that there were eight pages.  In a contemporary article in El Heraldo de Madrid, Wenceslao Retana indicates there were thirty-two pages, but given the length of the known contributions this seems most unlikely.^[5] 

It  might be speculated  be speculated that Retana had not seen the paper himself, but had deduced from dispatches from Manila that eight sheets of paper, each folded in the centre and printed on both sides, would carry thirty-two sides of text.  

Most of the text was in font size 12, with a lesser amount in size 10.  

Tile and masthead

Valenzuela claims it was he who chose the title.  The word Kalayaan had only gained currency in a political context since Marcelo H. del Pilar employed it to render the Spanish word “libertad” when he translated José Rizal’s essay “El Amor Patrio” for the Manila paper Diariong Tagalog in 1882.^[6] 

Rizal himself had subsequently used “kalayaan” to render the French “liberté” when he translated the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” the famous document approved by the National Assembly of France in August 1789.^[7]

Printed in Tagalog beneath the banner title, in a smaller typeface, was the following:-

“Issued at the end of each month.

Year 1 – Yokohama, January 1896 – No.1

Subscription price – half a peso for three months.  To be paid in advance.  

If purchased, 2 reales per issue.

Submissions must be signed by their authors.

The news, as far as it can be told.”

Valenzuela claims credit, too, for Yokohama being put on the masthead as the place of publication and for the impression being given that Marcelo H. del Pilar was the editor of the paper.  Whether Del Pilar’s name was actually printed is not clear, but the lead editorial purported to be his message of greeting and solidarity to his compatriots, sent from afar.  According to Retana, Governor General Ramón Blanco at first believed that the “nuevo papel filibustero” had indeed emanated from Yokohama, and wanted to send an envoy, Alfredo Villeta, to Japan to investigate.  Blanco abandoned the idea, however, when asked to authorize a budget for the mission of 800 pesos over three months.  

The price for copies bought individually – 2 reales – was equivalent to 25 centavos.  Readers who paid in advance for three months, it was intended, should get a fifty per cent discount.  

Contents

No copy of the paper has yet been located, and with three signal exceptions – the poem “Pagibig sa tinubuang Bayan” and the articles “Ang dapat mabatid ng mga tagalog” and “Pahayag” – its incendiary contents are little known.  

In his Archivo, Retana gives the titles of six contributions to the paper: (i) the lead editorial - “Sa mga kababayan”; (ii)  “Pahayag” [signed Dimas Alan]; (iii) “¡Katuiran din naman!” [signed Madlangaway]; (iv) “Ang dapat mabatid ng mga tagalog” [signed Agap-Ito Bagum-bayan]; (v) “Pagibig sa tinubuang Bayan” [signed A.B. or A.I.B.]; and (vi)  “Balita.”

In an article in the Spanish daily Heraldo de Madrid, however, Retana seems to allude to two further pieces.  One contribution to Kalayaan, he writes, condemns the religious ideas taught by the friars as nothing but myths, and the churches as places of idolatry and greed.  Another piece, he says, salutes the Cuban revolt against Spain and the victory of Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5.  Japan is hailed as a nation to be admired and emulated.^[8]  None of these topics is treated in the Kalayaan texts so far located, so unless they were carried as news items under the heading “Balita” they must have been raised in contributions that are as yet unknown.  Valenzuela, similarly, remembers there being an article by Emilio Jacinto in Kalayaan “urging the Filipino people to revolt as the only recourse to secure liberty,” a description that likewise does not fit any of the known items.    

Texts

The texts reproduced on the following pages are as close as possible to the originals as it is currently possible to get, ordered as Retana suggests they appeared in Kalayaan’s pages:  

A previously unpublished draft, in Tagalog, of a substantial section of the lead editorial, “Sa mga kababayan,” together with a new English translation of the entire piece.

A fresh English translation from the Spanish of the allegorical piece entitled “Pahayag,” of which the original Tagalog text has never been found.

A previously unpublished Tagalog version, with an English translation, of the article “¡Katuiran din naman!”

The famous rallying call “Ang dapat mabatid ng mga tagalog,” with a fresh English translation.

The well-known poem “Pagibig sa tinubuang Bayan,” with two Tagalog versions printed in parallel.

Previously unpublished poems by Emilio Jacinto, “¡¡¡ Gomez, Burgos, Zamora !!!” and “Sa Bayang tinubuan,” that he most likely wrote for Kalayaan’s aborted second issue.  

The Tagalog versions of “Sa mga kababayan”, “¡Katuiran din naman!” and “Pagibig sa tinubuang Bayan” have been transcribed (with difficulty) from three separate handwritten drafts found in the Madrid military archives.  It is unlikely that these versions are either the “original” first drafts or the “final” texts that actually appeared in print.  Most probably, in other words, there were earlier drafts, and almost certainly there were later amendments.  

In each case, it appears that the handwriting is not that of the person to whom the piece is most commonly ascribed.  “Sa mga kababayan,” usually attributed to Emilio Jacinto, looks to be in the handwriting of Andres Bonifacio.  Conversely, a note on the front page of “Pagibig sa tinubuang Bayan”, which is usually attributed to Bonifacio, is in the handwriting of Emilio Jacinto, as is the manuscript of  “¡Katuiran din naman!”, which Valenzuela claims to have authored.  But the identities of the respective penmen, of course, do not necessarily correspond with the identities of the respective authors.   The editorial “Sa mga kababayan” is unsigned, but beneath “¡Katuiran din naman!” appears the pseudonym “Madlangaway,” which Valenzuela said was his, and beneath the poem are the initials “A.B.”, suggesting Andres Bonifacio.   It is entirely plausible that the texts were copied, one by Bonifacio and two by Jacinto, whilst Kalayaan was being prepared for publication, perhaps for editing purposes and perhaps to make them more legible for the printers.  All that can be said for sure is that Bonifacio and Jacinto collaborated very closely in putting the paper together, and that in proclaiming the Katipunan’s revolutionary message they spoke as if with a single voice.