60 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
themselves to prison and returned to Angola, inspired by Toko’s
liberationist message.^32 This refusal of allegiance to ‘worldly gov-
ernment’ brings us back once again to a critical point in the his-
tory of Christian Anarchist thought, from Tolstoy to Adin Ballou
and Jacques Ellul: the problem of allegiance and subjection to
‘authority’.^33 However, what cases like the Tokoist and others de-
scribed by these authors show us is that the notion of subjection
must be bracketed and considered in terms of how such move-
ments understand and experience God – if as an autocratic source
of domination or as an egalitarian source of ‘love’.
Other examples of resistance would follow, namely during the
subsequent decades in Angola. After being deported from the
Belgian Congo in January 1950, Toko and his followers were sub-
ject to several measures of repression and control on behalf of the
Portuguese authorities, which became increasingly suspicious of
their political motivations. In order to exert control, they decided
to separate the group into smaller teams, which would be dispersed
into different labour camps, prisons, detention compounds or ‘resi-
dence fixation’ areas throughout the territory^34. One such case took
place in the colonato (plantation) of Vale do Loge (Uíge, northern
Angola), to where a group of about one hundred Tokoists was sent
to serve as enslaved labour for the construction and development
of a coffee plantation. They sojourned in the plantation for about
ten years, before fleeing into the bushes and the Congo at the out-
break of the independence war in 1961. Many of the survivors I
interviewed described how they were able to establish a particular
form of collective organization in which they would carry out the
orders of the plantation chiefs in their own terms, where the fittest
would cover for the weakest in the heaviest work, apparently with
the complacency of the authorities that watched over them, allow-
ing for their autonomy as long as the work was completed. Grenfell
also describes how they refused to take up work that they deemed
inhuman, and were encouraged by Toko to seek specific job train-
ing that would allow them to gain future economic autonomy. In
any case, due to the relatively peaceful and orderly situation of
the plantation, it became a model for the local authorities, who
invited the Angolan General Governor, Silva Carvalho, in 1954 for
a visit to appreciate the success of the agricultural venture.^35 But