ABSTRACT
For intellectuals and activists leading anti-colonial struggles, the ethical could become and often was developed as an explicit agenda in the conduct of political life. Alongside their insistence that colonialism’s mission was unconscionable, colonized people could also claim the moral high ground of the injured. Righteousness functioned as a compensation for the lack of material power, allowing them to go beyond the abjectness of victims or the rage and ressentiment of the vanquished. When anti-colonial struggles were launched, they threw up leaders marked by individual ‘greatness’. Many found the rhetoric of moral rightness as much as political rights of strategic use in mass mobilization.
