The peasant-born Apolinario Mabini, whose 150th birth anniversary passed last Wednesday with few being even aware of it, was one of the two greatest intellectuals produced by the reform and revolutionary periods in Philippine history.
Mabini, who by dint of hard work became a lawyer by the time he was 30, has not received the recognition he deserves, although he belongs in the same company as Jose Rizal. True, those hideous clichés that describe him as “The Brains of the Revolution” and even worse, as “The Sublime Paralytic,” regularly fall from the lips of schoolboys and the clueless creatures who pass for government officials in the country of our despair, but the reality is that very few Filipinos are familiar with, much less appreciative of, the unique role he played in the making of the Filipino national community and in defining the philosophical and historical bases of the Philippine Revolution.
