58 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
There was also another book known as Vita Velela (“Holy War”),
used by the elder members of the group. Furthermore, in the 1946
missionary conference he met and engaged with representatives
from different protestant churches, exchanging publications such
as the Watchtower’s Sentinel – engagements that progressively
undermined his loyalty to the Baptist missionary endeavour and
pushed him towards an independentist, liberationist movement.
This plural inspiration was, from a theological point of view,
fundamental for the development of a utopian project, very much
inspired by the Jehovah’s Witnesses millenarian restorationist es-
chatology, in particular their belief in God’s Kingdom as a liter-
al government in heaven. This, therefore, implied a rejection of
worldly government. As a Tokoist elder who followed him in the
days of Léopoldville told me (February 2012), Toko would always
tell them to be “prepared to work their own land” in the future,
anticipating a new governmentality. But Toko also always called
for a peaceful form of resistance to colonial oppression, which
was simultaneously obedient with the established authorities but
refused any form of externally imposed subjection, while explicitly
denying any kind of involvement in violent resistance or guerrilla
actions in the subsequent years.^27 This form of ‘obedient resis-
tance’, however paradoxical as it may seem, was in fact rooted in
two dispositions: an exegesis of Jesus’ gospel as an essentially pac-
ifist and love-informed preaching that prefigures a different image
of God other than the old covenant autocratic, violent one^28 and
simultaneously a strong sense of utopian expectation, a personal
conviction of an imminent change that would proclaim their mes-
sianic victory over the soon-to-be defunct worldly government. In
the first stance, one can appreciate a similar interpretation to that
of Leo Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God is Within You, in which he
points out the centrality of non-violent resistance in the Christian
gospel, which he configured as a ‘new theory of life’.^29 In the sec-
ond, we observe a process de-totalization of the colonial system,
the recognition of its fallibility, mediated by the inauguration of
an expectation that questioned the ‘victorious history’ imposed by
the colonial regime.^30
One example of the irrevocability of the Tokoists’ sover-
eign positioning can be found in the moment of their arrest in