Mongondow

The Mongondow are an Austronesian people of western North Sulawesi, concentrated in Bolaang and Gorontalo. Tradition places their earliest ancestors around Mount Komasan, where they lived by hunting, fishing and processing sago before spreading across the surrounding highlands.

In the thirteenth century leaders known as bogani united their groups into the maritime kingdom of Bolaang, whose first king was Mokodoludut. In the eighteenth century its ruler Salmon Manoppo (r. 1735-1764) fought the Dutch East India Company, was captured and exiled to the Cape of Good Hope, then returned amid protests; from this time the realm was called Bolaang Mongondow.

The Mongondow had become predominantly Muslim, and their language belongs to the Greater Central Philippine branch of Austronesian, while Manado Malay served as a lingua franca. Through the early nineteenth century the kingdom remained self-ruling under growing Dutch colonial supervision.