64 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
process of political succession. This process was all but successful,
as many different sectors of the church were not able to agree
on who represented the legitimate authority, and, amidst sever-
al different kinds of mutual accusations, began a process of in-
ternal dismemberment. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, what
was a single entity was consecutively divided into several different
Tokoist groups, some of which were able to obtain legal recogni-
tion (in 1992). Thus today one can no longer talk about a Tokoist
Church, but instead of Tokoist Churches in plural.
This situation lasted roughly until the year 2000, when a se-
ries of events dramatically changed the church’s political situa-
tion. One of the sectors began to be led by a man, Afonso Nunes,
who claimed to have been visited and ‘inhabited’ by the spirit of
Simão Toko and, after taking office, undertook a movement of
reunification and transversal transformation – to the point that it
is today one of the most successful churches in post-war Angola.^43
Apart from the dramatic reforms undertaken in the sector under
Nunes’ leadership, he also introduced a bureaucratic novelty: the
inauguration of a bishopric, as a mechanism to solve the critical
problem of leadership. Despite the contestation of many groups
that remain somewhat marginal, Nunes’ proposal can be consid-
ered a success, from an economic and political point of view, as he
was also able to enact an almost complete reunification. Thus to-
day, this sector appears in Angola as hegemonic in what concerns
the public perception of Tokoism. Bishop Nunes and the Tokoist
Church appear almost daily in the Angolan media, in a constant
display of success and wealth – of which the majestic “Universal
Cathedral”, inaugurated in the summer of 2012 in eastern Luanda
and congregating dozens of thousands of followers every week, is
the ultimate example.
However, despite these processes of heightened hierarchization,
through certain dimensions of the remembrance of Toko today
we can see that the principles of mutuality and anti-hierarchical
organization are still active to this day. One example is the way
Toko is remembered as an individual and leader in the church by
those who met him in person: like a humble person, consistently
refusing any kind of moral, political or economic superiority vis-
à-vis his own followers. For instance, he refused to be called pai