Bonifacio's Death

In the last couple of days, after finishing reading Stephen Jay Gould's The Lying Stones Of Marrakech, I picked up this small book, almost like a booklet, The Tragedy Of The Revolution by Adrian Cristobal. I am a big fan of history but recently I haven't been reading Philippine history due to lack of books accessible enough to me with living outside the country. I have in my shelves here a few books I picked up in one of my visits to PowerBooks during one of my vacations. All in all there are exactly six small books comprising what I call my Filipinana section. Three of them are about Andres Bonifacio the Katipunan Supremo; the other two Bonifacio books are by Ambeth Ocampo. I quickly finished Cristobal's book and while reading it, it made me realize that I really need to go back to reading more about Philippine history since the book showed that I am grossly ignorant of a lot of the details in the most important episodes of the history of our people. I knew that Bonifacio was killed by fellow Filipinos but I never knew more than that. He was portrayed as an unfortunate casualty of the revolution, his death was brought upon by his own short temper in the Tejeros Convention. While reading Cristobal's book, I felt angry about the circumstances surrounding the hero's death. In sweeping the historical narrative into a cohesive whole historians seemed to have sanitized the past such that we forget that the people involved are individuals not without their own (good and/or evil) motives and convictions. In the second book i am reading now by Ocampo, there is the excerpt of the memoir of Gregoria De Jesus, Bonifacio's widow, narrating about her two-weeks search for the remains of her husband without getting any meaningful help from people who could have easily shown her the exact spot. According to Cristobal, Bonifacio fell victim to a conspiracy by the Magdalo faction to remove him so that the Katipunan would be under the new revolutionary government that they were to form. Cristobal provided good arguments in this view, in that it was not necessary to kill Bonifacio in order to achieve their aim. I am now going to trying to read additional documents that can shed more light into what he called the tragedy of the revolution.