In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (19 page)

Pronounced dead by overly-blasé Congolese radio presenters years ago, ‘La Sape'—central Africa's equivalent of the Mod movement—was clearly alive and well, I noted with approval, albeit surviving in straitened circumstances. Proud of their status as fashion victims, a new generation of ‘sapeurs' had turned style into a form of near-religion (dubbed ‘kitendi'), complete with its ‘grand priests'—the classiest of dressers—and its ‘deities'—the international designers. The show, evidently, was still going on.

An abbreviation of Society of Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance, La Sape as a movement was actually born across the river in Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s. But it was in Zaire that it really made its mark, moving hand-in-hand with the explosion of the Lingala music phenomenon onto the international scene and fuelled by the birth of a monied urban elite who had travelled, shopped abroad, and knew their Yamamoto from their Montana, their unstructured jacket from their deconstructed suit.

As bands signed recording contracts in France and Belgium, their members hit the designer shops of Place Vendôme and Place Stephanie, returning to Kinshasa with suitcases full of ‘griffes' (designer labels) to show off. Fans of rival bands would compete to see who could look cooler, perfecting dance techniques that allowed them to show off their socks on the disco floor, or display the crucial silk labels on the insides of their jackets. The biggest star of all, Papa Wemba—who enjoyed the jaunty title of ‘Le Pape de la Sape'—spearheaded one craze after another with his on-stage appearances.
There was the time of the three-quarter length trousers, the time for braces, the time when Jean-Paul Gaultier was all the rage.

The movement, I knew, had gone into something of a decline with the general drying up of disposable incomes. The death of Niarkos, a famous Kinshasa mobster who rivalled Papa Wemba for narcissism, had dealt it another blow. Yet here they were: the shirts looked a little grey, the jackets far from new and the battered shoes were the biggest give-away, but this flock of down-at-heel young peacocks were keeping up appearances nonetheless.

‘Of course it's still alive,' snorted the man known as ‘Colonel Jagger'. ‘If anything, La Sape has just become part of the mainstream, it's been vulgarised. Government ministers wear couture and have sapeur hairstyles. Just look at the young church pastors—even they now assert themselves.'

Asserting oneself (‘affirmer') is one of the key concepts in La Sape's vocabulary, ranking in importance alongside understanding how to ‘débarquer'—make an entrance (never, but never, to go unnoticed)—and knowing how to walk. A sapeur's walk is an art form in itself, a mixture of swagger and stroll as individualistic as a graffiti artist's tag. ‘Do you remember John Travolta's way of walking in
Saturday Night Fever
? Well, we were doing that long before he did,' said Colonel Jagger. ‘You lollop, you almost dance. It's each man's way of standing out from the crowd.'

Recognised as a key proponent of La Sape, Colonel Jagger, manager of the rival band Viva La Musica, nevertheless proved a slight disappointment on first encounter. Dressed in a simple black T-shirt and jeans, this quietly spoken and rather sombre individual had none of the flamboyance I had come to expect. Ah, but that was where I was mistaken, said Colonel Jagger, when I confessed my surprise. ‘This may be understated, but it's still La Sape. These are Weston shoes, Ferré jeans and the T-shirt is by Gaultier. All in all, this outfit probably cost over £1,200.'

We were in the heart of noisy, smelly Matonge—‘my Matonge' as Colonel Jagger referred to it. But the pink-walled house was situated in an unexpected enclave of peace, hidden down an acacia-lined
avenue. In the street, urchins were playing football and neighbours were sitting chatting quietly in the trees' shade. They watched us with interest, but were careful to keep a respectful distance from the Colonel, one of Kinshasa's acknowledged VIPs. And keeping your distance, establishing some personal space, as it turned out, was a principle that went to the very heart of La Sape, along with bitter contempt for slavish imitators (‘suivistes') and those with money but no sense of style (‘taureaux'). ‘Our slogan is “No indiscriminate contact” (Pas de contact avec n'importe qui),' said Colonel Jagger. ‘It means we keep our distance from the police, the authorities and we don't get mixed up in politics. We keep away from those people because they don't understand us. They go crazy when they realise that someone with empty pockets is going around in an outfit costing 12,000 French francs (£1,200).' Those whose aspirations had been stifled all their lives had pushed sartorial elegance to a point where it became far more than self-indulgence. It became a mission.

Much of the movement's original inspiration came from the first films shown in Kinshasa. During colonial times, the Belgians would send lorries into what were then the ‘indigenous quarters', set up their projectors in the open air and screen movies for the entire neighbourhood. The adventures of the Three Musketeers, with their swash-buckling costumes, and the black-and-white thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s, with their sharp mobster outfits, seemed the epitome of Western cool. Later on came borrowings from the British pop scene. The colonel took on the name of his favourite rock star, Mick Jagger, and acknowledged his admiration for Bryan Ferry, ‘my favourite Englishman'.

There were more recent signs that La Sape was being infected by the ‘slob' look embraced by America's blacks, all outsized jeans, baggy dungarees and shorts that drop to calf level. But Colonel Jagger, who dismissed the style as ‘the white man's look', remained a conservative, with a philosophy bordering on the austere. He stressed the importance of cleanliness, preached against violence, abhorred hard drugs (‘if you use hard drugs, you get dirty, so you can't be a sapeur') and shaved his head once a week to avoid a messy hairstyle.

The sapeurs fancy themselves the best dancers in town and are often the players who decide when a particular disco step has outlived its interest and it is time to adopt a new one. The Kwasa-Kwasa, the Kotcho-Kotcho, the Otshule: the dances are born, sweep across the nightclubs of Africa and Europe and then mysteriously disappear, replaced by a new style that involves using the hips more, perhaps, a slightly different rhythm, or moving the foot and arm in tandem.

The crazes are not without a sense of political and social irony. The Etutana dance, based on the principle of rubbing yourself vigorously against your partner and with a chorus of ‘ça c'est bon' (‘it feels good'), was a reaction to the AIDS awareness campaign which was trying to persuade young Congolese to stop having unprotected sex. More recently, the Ndombolo has been causing a stir. Said to have been invented by the street kids of Kinshasa, it involves spreading the legs far apart, bending the knees and poking one's bottom in the air. Banned as obscene in Cameroon, the Ndombolo is not very graceful. But then, it's not meant to be, because the Ndombolo combines a crude imitation of sex with mocking mimicry of the gait of the overweight Laurent Kabila. This is one dance that did not originate with the sapeurs, who consider it below their dignity. ‘A sapeur will never, ever dance the Ndombolo,' said Colonel Jagger. ‘Gyrating your hips is fine for women, that's our view. But a sapeur moves as little as possible, just enough to show off his trousers or his shoes. If you're wearing a nice outfit, you obviously don't want to break into a sweat.'

Ask a sapeur about the motivation behind the phenomenon, and he will usually mention a desire to prove to the Europeans, who brought clothing to central Africa, that they could be beaten at their own game, that the once-naked savages had become cooler and more elegant than their dowdy colonisers. But another factor was the desire to react against the stylistic monotony of the Mobutu years, when ‘authenticity' led to the outlawing of Western dress, ties were regarded as subversive and the ghastly ‘abacost' jacket was supposed to hang in every loyal citizen's wardrobe. For a population known for its love of display, few decrees could have been more demoralising.

‘For twenty years people here wore a uniform,' recalled Colonel
Jagger. ‘We were the only ones who refused to do so. At concerts sapeurs would be beaten up for wearing suits. It was a way of saying “no” to the system, of showing there's a difference between us and everyone else. A way of feeling good about ourselves.' Once the sapeur had embraced that lifestyle choice, days off were not permitted. ‘Sapeurs don't dress for other people. They dress for themselves. And in contrast with most people, who dress up at the weekend or to go out, they dress smartly every day of the week.'

But wasn't all this a rather trivial way of expressing revolt? In other countries, frustrated young men took to the streets or got involved in politics. In Kinshasa, the generation holding out hope for the future was busy fussing about the colour of their socks. Wasn't this a waste of energy better channelled elsewhere? ‘It's easy for you to talk. But the older generation here has fenced off the world of politics. This is a world where you can't go out and shout in the street, where you suffocate, because there is no room to breathe. I have no weapons, so instead I create a world of my own,' explained Colonel Jagger.

Certainly, when you considered the practical difficulties involved in being a sapeur today, as opposed to the years when money was still washing around the system, the struggle to ‘affirm' oneself acquired a near-heroic quality.

A pair of good shoes started at $100 in Kinshasa, almost equivalent to the average yearly per capita income logged by UN agencies. The clothes displayed in the boutiques of the Hotel Intercontinental, expensive even by European standards, were well beyond most locals' reach. Unable to actually buy the Versace jackets, Paul Smith shoes and Gianfranco Ferré trousers they so longed for, the sapeurs depended on their friends—especially those abroad—for loans and swaps. ‘Most of us rely on trading items between friends rather than outright buying,' said Colonel Jagger. ‘There's a certain solidarity. I know which of my friends has money at any given time and we help each other out. We tighten our belts. But either you're a sapeur or you're not. It's not a question of money. It's a question of taste.'

Talking to the melancholic Colonel, I was suddenly overwhelmed
by that sense of tragic waste, of crippled potential, that so often sweeps over one in Africa. This articulate, subtle man was no longer young. He had reached the age when most men have relegated an obsession with jean brands and fancy waistcoats to the mental drawer where they keep their motorbike manuals and collection of Bo Derek posters. Yet here we were, discussing shoe makes and dancing styles with the seriousness a Buddhist would devote to meditation techniques.

And then I remembered an excerpt from
The Road to Wigan Pier
, in which George Orwell wrote about the spending habits of the poor, the tendency of the bored, miserable and harassed to fritter their wages on chips and ice-cream instead of the dull, wholesome food that would keep them healthy. Middle-class puzzlement missed the point, suggested Orwell, for being able to ‘treat yourself' was the only thing that made such existences bearable. La Sape, I realised, was that principle seen through to its philosophical conclusion. Spending your money on a luxury rather than a necessity was part of what kept you human, as essential to a sense of self-worth as the smear of lipstick on the face of a pensioner. Acting the dandy in modern-day Congo was like playing the gourmet in a concentration camp. The harder finding a Comme des Garçons shirt became, the more convincingly its eventual wearer proved he remained master of his fate.

‘Papa Wemba, Niarkos and I, we brought the young people here hope—we made them realise that you didn't have to be the son of a rich man to make it,' said Colonel Jagger. ‘They regard us as role models. No matter how poor, they aspire to one day dressing like us. Even a boy in the street here will know who his favourite designer is.' I must have been looking sceptical, because Colonel Jagger called one of the urchins playing football in the dust over to prove his point. ‘Go on, ask him.' ‘Who's your favourite couturier?' I said in French. The boy shuffled his bare feet, picked at his filthy shorts and looked down at the floor. ‘I don't know.' ‘He doesn't understand the question,' said Colonel Jagger tolerantly. ‘Griffe oyo olingaka mingi ezali nini?' he translated, and at the word ‘griffe' the boy's eyes lit up in
immediate understanding. ‘Versace for jackets and Girbaud for jeans,' he answered, without a moment's hesitation.

 

The sapeurs
had managed to keep their dreams alive, skating around the edge of despair without tumbling in. But there were those who had seen their complicated fantasy edifices come crashing down. Standing in the rubble, they gazed around them with clear eyes and shuddered at what they found.

Most of the expatriate community seemed to fall into that category. Often they were the children of Belgian administrators, Greek businessmen or Portuguese shopkeepers who remembered frightened mothers standing guard with machetes during the civil disturbances of the 1960s and listening wide-eyed to tales of lions prowling outside rural compounds. Or they were Europeans of humble origins with grandiose ambitions, who thought they had discovered in Africa the freedom to cast off the shackles of class and prejudice and reinvent themselves.

Congo had been a home that once offered warmth, laughter, endless possibilities and the automatic respect accorded a white man in Africa. Europe seemed alien territory where aspirations were cramped, relationships strained. Initially convinced they possessed the intuitive understanding that would allow them to solve the riddle, beat the Congolese conundrum, they had stayed on after each outbreak of violence. ‘This country is like a woman,' a Belgian lawyer lamented. ‘She cheats you once and you forgive her and come back. Then she cheats you again and you forgive her once more. She keeps cheating and you keep coming back.'