ABSTRACT
The Philippines celebrated the centennial of its birth as a nation on 12 June 1998. In temperatures that soared into the mid 30s centigrade, huge crowds gathered in central Manila to watch a parade of floats commemorating the historic moment when General Emilio Aguinaldo issued a proclamation declaring his country independent after 333 years of Spanish colonialism. As the events surrounding that occasion were re-enacted in front of President Fidel Ramos, he was symbolically handed the national flag to wave in the place of his illustrious pre decessor. No other gesture could so clearly identify him in the public’s eye as the general’s direct heir and leader of a sovereign state. But the centennial was much more than a celebration of that single act. It was a series of anniversaries commemorating the significant stages in a popular revolution that engulfed the Philippines archipelago between the open declaration of liberty made at Pugad Lawin in 1896 and the adoption of Asia’s first republican constitution at Malolos in 1899.
