Simão Toco

The movement began with singing. Simão Toco, mission-educated in northern Angola, moved to Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo and in the 1940s formed a choir among Angolan migrants there, at a time when Angolans in the colony were a distinct and rather isolated community. The choir became a study group, the study group became a congregation, and on a night in 1949 members reported the descent of the Holy Spirit, with trembling and speaking, which the movement takes as its founding. The Belgian authorities, who had spent thirty years suppressing Kimbanguism, recognised the pattern and acted quickly: in 1950 Toco and several thousand followers were expelled across the border into Portuguese Angola.

The Portuguese then dispersed them through the colony and moved Toco repeatedly to keep him from any settled following. The strategy failed in the same way it had failed in the Congo. Dispersal planted congregations in every region it touched, and by independence in 1975 the church was one of the largest religious bodies in Angola. Members are identified by white clothing, the posture of the church is pacifist and it has consistently refused political alignment, which did not spare it under either colonial or post-independence governments.

Tocoism and Kimbanguism are usually read together, and the parallels are close enough to be worth setting out. Both founders were Bakongo, both were educated in Baptist mission schools, both began with a spiritual event that the mission had taught them to expect and then could not control, both were treated as political threats by a colonial state, and both movements were spread rather than suppressed by mass deportation of their members. Both churches are large today, both use white clothing, and both refuse political involvement as a matter of stated principle while being unavoidably political in effect.

The differences matter too. Kimbangu preached for five months and spent thirty years in a cell; Toco led his movement for four decades, mostly under restriction but in contact with it. Kimbanguism grew in the Belgian Congo and Tocoism among Angolans, so the two churches map onto different colonial and then national histories. Taken together they are the clearest evidence that the prophetic churches of the Kongo region were not imitations of one another but repeated responses to the same conditions: a Christianity taught by missionaries, withheld in practice, and reclaimed by Africans who had learned it well.