José Rizal
José Rizal wrote two novels that Spain could not forgive, was shot for a revolution he had refused to join, and is the national hero of a country that still argues about whether he wanted it to exist. He was born in 1861 at Calamba, the son of a prosperous tenant family on a Dominican estate, and he was the kind of prodigy colonial societies produce and cannot place: a doctor trained in Madrid, Paris and Heidelberg, a linguist with a working knowledge of twenty languages, a sculptor, a fencer, and a novelist. Noli Me Tangere, published in Berlin in 1887, and its sequel El Filibusterismo in 1891 are the indictment of the friar orders that governed the islands in fact - their estates, their monopoly of the parishes, their power to have a man deported on a word - written as satirical fiction by someone who had grown up on one of their estates. Both were banned, and both were read. He came home in 1892 and founded the Liga Filipina, a reformist association asking for representation in the Cortes and equality before the law. He was arrested within days and exiled to Dapitan, in Mindanao, where he practised medicine, ran a school and mapped the coast for four years. Andrés Bonifacio founded the Katipunan, the secret society that would make the revolution, the week the Liga was broken up, and used Rizal's name as its password. Rizal, asked to endorse the rising in 1896, refused, and was on a ship to Cuba to serve as a Spanish army doctor when it broke out. He was brought back, tried by court martial for sedition on the evidence of the novels and the Liga, and shot on the Luneta in Manila on 30 December 1896, at thirty-five, having written the night before the poem the schoolchildren learn. The Americans made him the national hero in preference to Bonifacio, who had fought; the Filipinos kept him, and put his death day on the calendar.
- Lived: 1861 CE – 1896 CE
- Nationality: Filipino
- Roles: writer, physician, nationalist
