56 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
As a result, through such movements of contestation, specif-
ic ideas of sovereignty were being tested against a given socio-
political order that was in a permanent process of self-construction
as crystallized and unquestioned.^22 From this perspective, in their
revolutionary mind-sets they conveyed a very ‘Proudhonian’ re-
jection of the state.^23 After the political transition into the postco-
lony, most of them, however, resulted in new socialist formations
and political regimes that proved to be more totalitarian than the
previous colonial regimes (Angola being a case in point). Likewise,
movements such as Kimbanguism also evolved into complex,
hierarchical state-like endeavours.^24 In the process, while many
religious movements embarked successfully in the new political
orders, others, like the Tokoist Church, remained until very re-
cently marginal and ambiguous.
Spiritual and political formations
Considering the socio-political setting described above, one can
imagine that it would be difficult to live in a place like 1940s
Léopoldville and ignore its political effervescence. However, the
emergence of Tokoist mutualist prophetism was also imbued with
a theological formation, informed by the protestant covenantal
ethos, by which the relationship between God and the believer is
one of direct ‘alliance’, thus dispensing hierarchizing mechanisms
of mediation. When Simão Toko arrived to Léopoldville in 1943,
he was a young man (25 years old) with a pedagogic and spiri-
tual training in the Baptist missions, where he began as a student
and empregado (service boy) at the missionaries’ houses. Due to
his outstanding performance as a teenage student, he had been
granted the possibility of moving to Luanda to obtain secondary
education, sponsored by the missionaries. Upon its completion, he
returned north, and was hired as a teacher in the Bembe mission –
his last stop before his migration to the Belgian Congo.
However, after consecutive disagreements with the Baptist
leaders, Toko began a process of estrangement that culminated
in the irreversible emancipation and autonomization observed in
Léopoldville. He disagreed on cases such as the salary received by
indigenous teachers in the missions, and the fact that the students