Why did Ninoy Aquino return home that fate-defining day 25 years ago? The threats to the life of the leader of the opposition to Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos were as numerous as they were credible. Even the risks outlined for him by one half of the conjugal dictatorship, Imelda Marcos, while they inevitably carried a whiff of Imeldific exaggeration, were in the end plausible and sobering. Too, under Marcos law, Aquino was facing a death sentence; to return to the Philippines after three years in exile was not only to tempt the gods of extrajudicial executions but also to dare the divinities controlling the judicial kind.

Exile is emasculating; it tantalises displaced political activists with glimpses of power, intimations of influence, at the very time it weighs them down with an air of impotence. But, however peripheral an exile’s life can be, it is still to be preferred (or at least many of us would choose it in the normal course of things) to a life in prison. If Aquino had survived any assassination attempt or enjoyed even a temporary relief from the death sentence a military tribunal imposed on him, he would still have ended up in jail - closer to the people he wanted to serve, but even more at the mercy of the people he opposed.

There was talk even then that, despite all he had gone through (including seven years and seven months in Marcos’ prisons before being allowed to seek medical treatment in the United States), he was the stricken dictator’s chosen successor. In this view, Aquino was coming home as part of a political arrangement. This is a scenario conspiracy theorists can readily embrace, but in fact there is nothing there, nothing to put one’s arms around. Aquino may or may not have figured in some scenario-building by ambitious political operators, but he was never, he could never have been, Marcos’ preferred successor. Aquino had grown too much in political maturity, had been too thoroughly purged by a difficult decade of imprisonment and exile, to even consider accepting a deal that would have exonerated the dictator.

There was talk, too, that Aquino was really nothing more than a traditional politician with an unslaked lust for power, and that, sensing Marcos’ imminent death, he had wanted to come home to place a claim on the succession. This was an image that readers of Marcos’ crony press could readily visualise; they had been fed a steady diet of unflattering stories about a young and on-the-make politician, surrounded by a battalion of bodyguards and an overwhelming sense of elite entitlement. But in fact the crony press did not acknowledge, and indeed failed to recognise, that Aquino was a radically changed man because of what Marcos and his regime had done to him. Aquino’s years in the Marcos gulag had purged him of artifice and ambition.

In other words, Ninoy Aquino’s decision to come home at a perilous time in the country’s history, and at great personal risk, could only have happened because he had been imprisoned and he had been exiled.

We are all familiar with what is perhaps Aquino’s most famous utterance: that the Filipino is worth dying for. That statement, with Good Friday written all over it, resonates with many of us; it captures the essence of a very Filipino sense of martyrdom.

But the statement we should commit to memory explains why dying for someone is worth making in the first place. Being a willing victim (like, say, returning to either a quick death or the slow assassination that is imprisonment) unlocks the most powerful source of resistance to tyranny. According to Gandhi, Aquino explained, in the arrival statement he never read, this Easter source, this wellspring of liberty, is the willing sacrifice of the innocent.

Why, then, did he return home? Because as a willing victim he knew he had to. The video footage of his arrival shows Aquino looking concerned when soldiers entered the plane to fetch him. At that moment, he must have known (it shows on his face), that he had in fact chosen death. But at least he was back home, at last.