Gentlemen Of Bacongo by Daniele Tamagni.

art
12/16/2009

Congo: A cultural love-in.


by Rachel Newsome


In the photo by Italian photographer, Daniele Tamagni, Hassan Salvador and his friend march down the street with the kind of confidence and self assurance that comes from the possession of status, power and wealth. And they have the style to prove it; pressed trousers, sharp blazers, ties, cravats... And the colours - pinks, tangerines, lapis lazuli; outré, flamboyant, fuck-you; part Dandy, part gangsta – all shout loud and proud of a life lived and clothes worn as an exquisite work of art.


Behind them, however, is not any street lined with luxury apartments and exclusive boutiques but an unpaved dirt track bordered by shacks. While, in the background, a group of women and children stand shoeless in the dust where the two men have just walked with a look of what might be envy or might be regret. 

So stark is the contrast between these men and their surroundings that it could be two different images superimposed one over the other. Black men in white man’s clothes…elegance amid extreme poverty… there is both an endearing beauty and tragic irony to this photograph that goes right to the schizophrenic heart of the self-proclaimed cult of The Sape to which the two men belong. 

A chimerical mix of tribalism and individuality, deprivation and excess, political empowerment and apolitical decadence, Le Societe des Ambianceurs at des Personnes Elegantes, is a flourishing sub culture primarily based in the Congo, but also finding a home in Paris and London, dedicated to the worship above all else of the stylish suit. 

“We live in the outfits, with the outfits, for the outfits,” says Lalhande, one of the sapeurs photographed by Tamagni.
“A Congolese sapeur is a happy man even if he does not eat, because wearing proper clothes feeds the soul and gives pleasure to the body,” says Michel, another. 

Embedded deep in the Congo’s colonial roots and the double identity coded within, the beginning of the movement can be traced back to the 1920’s and ‘30s when rich Congolese who had spent time in France, returned wearing luxurious western-style suits. 

What began as emulating the style of the nation’s oppressors, took a new twist when Zaire was established as an independent African nation. A reaction against the “authenticity movement” insisted upon by President Mobuto’s authoritarian regime, wearing western style clothes became not only a sartorial statement but also a political one.
 
Then, wherever there is the SAPE, there is also music. The style became inextricably linked to the unique sound of Congolese street music in the sixties and seventies via pop sensation, Papa Wemba who, refusing to fade into the drab sea of “abcosts” (French for “a bas le costume or “down with the suit”) insisted upon by Mobuto, pioneered the “ungaru” style. Stepping out in 1930’s tapered trousers, brogues, neatly trimmed hair and a tweed hat worn at a rakish angle, Wemba became the SAPE’s first real high priest.

Choosing clothes over conflict, the SAPE movement also became associated with non-violence -  a characteristic which continues to this day (although, its inaction throughout the country’s three civil wars could also be read as political apathy as much as any pro-active campaign for peace.)

One of the many contradictions riddling the SAPE, meanwhile, is that far from eschewing tribalism, it has re-surfaced as the style duels which take place between factions on allocated “fight days”. Paris is pitted against Brussels, Brazaville’s strict “three-colour” code against Kinshasa’s maximalist contemporary approach and Bacongo against Mungali, as the serious and frivolous, the individual and the tribe are conflated into a high camp fashion melee. 

But what stands out most powerfully about the sapeurs is their belief in the transformative powers of clothes and with it, their embrace of a very particular Western ideal of freedom, which liberated from nationhood, family, community, tradition and institution is the self-authored freedom to roll your own dice. 

In those Weston’s, the Cavalli, Dior, Armani, Saint Laurent, Versace, Yamamoto the sapeurs are not living in a country torn apart by poverty and civil war, they are not un-employed or hustlers or relying on their girlfriends to pay the rent or still living at home with their parents. They are celebrities, paid to make appearances at private parties and public ceremonies. They are stars. 

And with music never far away from these men of style and taste, there are plenty of opportunities for the sapeurs to display their feathers at the parties and concerts which, following a trip to Kinshasa, artist Carsten Holler describes thus: “I’ve been to many different African countries but I’ve never seen anything like the music scene here. There would always be something going on; small concerts in people’s back yards, rehearsals, concerts in stadiums for 2 or 300,000 people.”

But, surrounded by abject poverty where many live on 30 cents a day, begging, borrowing and stealing to afford the clothes (it is said that even the movement’s hero, Papa Wemba resorted to people trafficking in order to be able to afford his habit – though this has never been confirmed), it’s hard not to wonder whether the Congolese sapeurs have been short-changed, adopting the psycho-pathology of the western notion of freedom - but without the affluence. 

Is it tragic, as anthropologist Franz Fanon has it in his influential 1952 book, “Black Skin, White Mask”, that “for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white” ??? Or are the sapeurs not victims at all but Hegelian victors merrily subverting the master-slave relationship in a triumph of fashion over fate? 

Or, appropriating something white and making it black, do the sapeurs simply represent the very height of global citizenship, constructing an identity from others and making it their own? As Holler, the artist behind Prada’s recent Congolese-inspired pop up, The Double Club, puts it; “It’s an interpretation of our culture. A fashion about our fashion but turned around and made completely different. Some of the Kinshasa sapeurs are known for wearing their stuff inside out so you can see the label because it’s an aesthetic statement.”

And what of our interest in the Congo? What of the appeal of the recent Double Club and its offering of Congolese music, food, art and design alongside its Western counterpart? What of European photographers like Tamagni and their fascination with the sapeurs? If, as Fanon puts it, this “juxtaposition of the black and white races” produces a “massive psycho-existential complex”, then defined both by what we are and what we are not, do not the sapeurs represent the massive psycho-existential complex inside all of us? Are we not all, as Rimbaud put it, “another”?

If the Congolese word for Brussels (a city hallowed by sapeurs as a fashion capital) is “lola” which translates as Paradise, do we not look to Africa as the original Eden? And do Kinshasa or Brazzaville not represent to us something authentic and raw – our paradise lost? 

Says former Double Club resident DJ and all round African music connoisseur, Todd Hart; “African music is more raw and more basic in a way that appeals to the reasons why we dance. It’s the same basic elements in disco and house but the people who make African music make no pretence about it. This is about getting your boogie down.”

In other words, perhaps we are all mesmerised by the Congo and “the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness,” described by Joseph Conrad in “Heart Of Darkness”, “that seemed to draw him (Kurtz) to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten, brutal instincts… (which) had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of the fires, the throb of the drums, the drone of weird incantations.”

For Fanon, this represented an “antinomy” that man would have to give up. Holler, though, would like us not only to accept this double-ness, but celebrate it, also.   “What we think of as this African craziness which is connected to all the problems we see in Africa is also potentially a very exciting thing,” he says. “It’s the strongest counter-cultural model to our culture which is based on utilitarianism and pragmatism and a logical system.”

He continues; “If you have a double situation, it makes things more complicated but intuitively, it seems like a very good model to work with. This kind of double-ness is very much an African thing. It feels very natural to the human mind. We’ve got where we can with singular models, so the double one could be a good one for now.”



Gentlemen of Bacongo by Daniele Tamagni is published by Trolley Books, London.



www.trolleybooks.com

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