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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Christopher Johnson. It's February 2nd, 2014, and you're balancing a plate of wings and blue cheese dip on your lap, watching the Seattle Seahawks thrash the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. Then, during one of the commercial breaks, you see this ad. In the middle of the screen, it says, Congo Brazzaville. There's a group of men doing hard, dirty work, clearing fields and fixing cars. In life.
You cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are. Next thing you know, the ad cuts to a new scene. It's the evening, and now we're at a bar. This is producer Ryan Lenora Brown. A crowd has formed a circle around those same men, who have shed their dirty work clothes for coral pink, canary, and bright tangerine-colored suits.
One by one, the men proudly strut and pose, twirling their gold pocket watches, snapping their suspenders, and shooting their cuffs as the crowd cheers them on. In the corner, a bartender smiles approvingly as he pours a glass of Guinness. You see, my friends, with every brace and every cufflink, we say, I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.
Okay, so I admit, at first glance, it may seem a bit out of left field that a group of Congolese men dressed like an exquisitely elegant pack of highlighters is out here selling Irish beer during the Super Bowl.
But actually, everyone from cinematographers to musicians to style mavens have finally been catching on to this loose-knit collective of dandies called Saporrs. They're from the Central African cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa. And since the 1970s, they've been known for donning technicolor three-piece suits with flamboyant accessories like golden walking sticks and leopard print fedoras, and then catwalking through their city streets.
In recent years, the Sapphires have blown up. Solange, Kendrick and SZA have all featured Sapphires in their music videos. The iconic British menswear designer Paul Smith did a whole spring line of Sapphire-inspired suits and bowler hats.
If you want to be delighted, do a real quick image search. When you see the Sapor's, it's obvious what makes them so attractive to famous artists and global brands. Their remix on classic menswear is irreverent and colorful and just a joy to look at. And these images are really different from the stereotypical way that sub-Saharan Africa is often portrayed to the world. Those images depict the region as broke and broken.
As an American journalist who's worked here for the past decade, I've seen those stereotypes. We all have. And the reality is life in places like the Congo is really difficult, especially after centuries of brutal colonization, resource extraction, and underdevelopment.
Into that bleak frame strolls the Saporce, these Congolese mechanics and construction workers and farmhands dressed up like aristocratic peacocks, flaunting their Ferragamo monk-strap shoes, silk Chanel scarves, and crisp Versace suits. ♪
For Sapphires, looking that clean is like two huge f*** yous. One for the cards they've been dealt, and the other to anyone who thinks those circumstances could ever define them. At the root of this is this phenomenon of having agency and using style. Chantrelle Lewis is author of the book Dandelion, The Black Dandy and Street Style, which features the Sapphires. Black men have taken the European suit.
and fashioned it with traditional African sensibilities. I'm talking about color. I'm talking about swag. I'm talking about using the European suit to defy their material conditions, defy their realities.
For more than a century, Black dandies like the Sepours have been engaged in what Chantrelle calls "dapper agitation." It's a counterintuitive kind of rebellion, right? Because in a way, formal wear is all about conformity. That's why we call people "suits." And jackets and ties came to this part of the world in a particularly ugly and violent way.
They were brought by colonizers who made dressing European a precondition for being treated like a human being. But the Sapors have flipped that script in dramatic fashion. They've taken the European suit, this thing that was forced on them, and made it wholly, authentically Congolese. And they've done it so well that now it's the rest of us trying to wear our clothes to look like them.
This radical fashion transformation began way before anybody in the Congo was calling themselves a sapeur. In fact, it started before the Congo was even a country of its own. It goes back to the first generations of Congolese men to put on suits and ties. Men like Frederick Mpenda.
— It's a sticky September day in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I'm sitting under a leafy mango tree in Frederick's yard. He's 89, dressed in the international off-duty grandpa uniform, a gray polo shirt and blue track pants. But 70 years ago, his fashion sense was a little different. Frederick flips open a photo album and points to a black-and-white picture.
There's a young man wearing a chic gray suit and tasseled loafers, holding a chunky baby with rolls like the Michelin Man.
Oh, wow. That's me, that's me, he says, pointing to the man in the suit. He turns to another photo of himself. This one is from the 1950s. Frederick is sitting on his bicycle, wearing a crisp white button-down and throwing the camera a brooding, serious gaze. His hair is close-cropped, and there's a long, straight part running through it. Ah, no, voilà. La re...
Look at that part. We were always trying to imitate white people, even though our hair is nappy. Frederick talks casually about it now. But when this photo was taken, imitating how white people dressed was a matter of survival here.
Back then, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the DRC, was a colony of the Belgians. They believed they needed to, quote, civilize the primitive Congolese, making them less African and more white. Growing up in the 1940s, Frederick's white school teachers made it crystal clear that the only way a Congolese boy like him could get ahead in life was to aspire to be as European as he possibly could.
Frederick took their advice to heart. As a young man, he perfected his French, he got his diploma, and in the 1950s, he took a job with the colonial government in Leopoldville, what's now Kinshasa. But of course, the Belgians were wild racists, who by this point had already spent more than a half century plundering Congo's minerals using slave labor. They didn't actually believe that someone like Frederick would ever be equal to them.
So Frederick found himself continually having to prove how Belgian he could be. Like when he applied to be an assistant to a colonial administrator. Ah! Voilà. D'abord, vous faites le test. You first did a short exam. If you passed the exam, you went to the hospital so they could see if you were physically fit or not. If they decided you were fit, they handed you a little bottle of cologne. On vous donne le flacon de eau de cologne.
In a thousand ways, the Belgians tried to erase the Africanness of the Congolese. In order to succeed, you had to speak and act and even smell like a white person. This was especially true for Frederick. That's because he was considered an évolué, which literally means an evolved one.
That's what the Belgians called a Congolese person who broke ties with their African identity and their community, and instead adopted a European system of values. Évoluer status gave people like Frederick access to education, jobs, and neighborhoods that most Congolese would never receive. But it also meant constantly being subjected to humiliating rituals. You come, you find yourself.
When you arrive at work, you would find a white man at the door. He will smell you. And if you did not smell good, if you did not wear the cologne, he will send you home. In our time, it was like that.
You could not be unclean. Évolués were expected to speak crisp French, eat with a knife and fork, and go to mass on Sundays. Sitting with Frédéric in his yard in Kinshasa, he explains to me that being an évolué meant having to look European, too. It's at this point in our conversation that he gets up and goes inside his house.
When he comes back, he's holding an armful of vintage suits. Frédéric's son, Caritoza, who was the chubby little baby Frédéric was holding in that snapshot, has been sitting with us the whole time. He starts going through his father's suits. This is the red Bordeaux color. Bordeaux.
One is deep red, kind of Bordeaux. There's a dark salmon pink one, a beige one. These suits date back to the 50s. Back then, Frederick filled his wardrobe with them. He bought them secondhand from shops created specifically for so-called évolués like him.
Frederick loved those suits. He still does. But they were also in some ways stifling, this elaborate European cosplay that many Congolese had to do just to be treated like human beings. So how do we get from that to the irreverence and joy and freedom of the sappers? I was led to the answer while sitting in notoriously awful Kinshasa traffic.
One afternoon, I was trying to get to an interview when my taxi lurched to a stop yet again in front of an old shipping container. It had been converted into a shoe store. There was a sign outside featuring a life-sized photo of a middle-aged man in aviators, dressed head-to-toe in black leather. It read, "'Papa Grief, Supreme Magistrate and Sapor of the State.'"
When I spoke with the Supreme Magistrate, I explained that I was trying to figure out exactly how suits, of all things, became such a vital form of self-expression in the DRC. Papa Grief didn't mention any tailors or designers. Instead, he pointed to something else as the origin of la sap, as the sap wars movement is known. La sap, in this country, was surrounded by music.
La sap came from this music. And then he said, let me show you. So the next night, I followed Papa Grief through a hole in a chain-link fence into a concrete courtyard. About a dozen guys were lounging with their instruments on overturned plastic drink crates. As we walked in, Papa Grief's band started to play.
♪
This is Congolese Roomba. Its roots date back to the 1940s, when Belgian officials were sniff-testing évoluées at the doors of their office jobs. Like the évoluées, the musicians of that era also dressed in suits and ties. But unlike the évoluées, their fashion frame of reference wasn't white Belgians.
Instead, Congolese artists took their fashion cues from Black American jazz musicians who had been dispatched to Leopoldville to play for U.S. troops during World War II. Locals also went to those shows and were awestruck by what they saw on stage. These jazz artists were impeccably dressed in suits and bow ties.
Didier Mamungi is a Congolese writer, historian and politician. He says that Congolese civilians used to go see these military bands in concert. And they loved how the Black American groups wore their Western-style suits. Black like the Congolese, but who dressed like the Europeans. Who dressed better than the Europeans. Better in what sense? In the sense of style.
What struck local artists, Didier says, was that the jazz men were black like the Congolese, but they dressed like Europeans. In fact, he says, they dressed better than Europeans. I asked him, better in what sense? He said, in the sense of style. Although jazz music never really took off in the Congo, jazz fashion definitely did. Congolese musicians quickly began to imitate the way that black American artists dressed.
Roomba fashion looked like it was straight out of Harlem, matching pinstripe suits, glossy loafers, colorful pocket squares. The ingredients of these outfits were similar to what the Évouloués wore, but with flashier colors and bigger accessories. For Congo's department stores, this was awesome news. It meant the suit and tie was now verifiably cool.
Store owners started hiring musicians as brand ambassadors who would wear their suits to concerts and bars, and even sometimes sing about them to drum up business. And that's how Congolese began to equate music with dressing up. The musicians themselves made clothes a central element of the music.
Over the next couple of decades, the music really took off, as Congolese artists started touring the world. By the 1970s, Roomba filled clubs from Kinshasa to Paris. Papa Grief grew up in this era. The musicians understood that they were in front of the world now, so they really wanted to look good.
The patron saint of this music was a flamboyant singer with a high, haunting voice who went by the stage name Papa Wimba. Papa Wimba.
As Papa Wimba toured the globe, he'd collect luxurious clothes by European and Japanese designers, adding new flamboyance to the more classic suit-and-tie look of Roomba artists. He strutted on stage in checkered safari suits with pith helmets and neon yellow bell-bottoms with psychedelic print shirts. He was partial to denim, crushed velvet, and floor-length fur coats, which he wore even in the sticky tropical heat. And he loved, loved a fine-tailored suit.
Here's Papa Wemba explaining in a 2004 documentary why he gravitated to such extravagant clothes early in his career. I wanted to be different because all the singers were doing the same thing. So I said to myself, I must find a gimmick, you know? Turn everybody on. You've got to turn the young people on.
Fans were already used to seeing Congolese musicians as style icons. But at a talk he gave in 2015, Papa Wimba described how he and other Roomba artists turned their shows into all-out fashion contests. In the 1970s, when we started our musical careers, there was a group of young people who came from Brazzaville to take part in the closing battle in Kinshasa. And they came to Kinshasa to challenge us.
This is where we should clarify that there are two Congos. One is the DRC, with the capital Kinshasa, colonized by the Belgians. The other one, just across the Congo River, was colonized by the French. Its capital is Brazzaville.
Roomba lovers would take ferries back and forth between the two cities, where there'd be fashion showdowns wherever Papa Wemba and other artists were performing. Well-dressed fans faced off, strutting and posing, showing off designer clothes, as crowds whistled and shouted for the best dressed. Those outfits often came from the overflowing closets of the musicians themselves.
Roomba artists collected high-end fashion while on tour, and they'd often sell those pieces used to fans who scrimped and saved for months to buy them. Or fans would get other Congolese traveling abroad to bring designer European clothes back home to Kinshasa and Brazzaville.
It's not clear exactly who decided this cult of luxury fashion needed a name, but by the mid-1970s, its acolytes were calling themselves sapeurs, a play on la sape, a French slang word for clothing. The sapeurs added a Congolese flourish to the term by making S-A-P-E, an acronym that means the Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons.
La Sapo was about dressing up to look good, to look elegant. It was also about the ambiance, the glow that you, the Sapoer, in your fine, beautiful formal wear brought into the world. In one of Papa Wimba's songs, Aisa Nazoa, he has a line that's become like a creed to the Sapoers. It goes like this. What was he like?
well-dressed, well-shaved, well-perfumed. That little hymn became shorthand for a much bigger philosophy, or sapology.
Unlike Papa Wemba, most Congolese Roomba fans couldn't really afford a closet full of silk shirts and designer suits. But the Sapours believe that if you could find a way to dress expensively, the world would treat you like an expensive person, whether you were a famous Roomba musician or a construction worker. Here's Papa Grief again. You understand, so the clothes change a person. We recognize the students.
Clothing changes a person. We recognize students are students by their uniforms. We recognize professional athletes by the jersey they wear. We know lawyers by the robes and doctors by the coats. You know a soldier when you see them because of the uniforms too. This is how you know who someone is. And when you see them,
To the sappers, fine formal wear announced to the world that you were the kind of person who deserved luxury. In the grand scheme, suits are a small thing. But Le Sap formed as proof that anyone could be a person who mattered, just by looking the part.
For a lot of young Congolese, that idea was extraordinary. So extraordinary that it didn't matter that you were going to have to totally break the bank to make it happen. That's how Yinda Gabi felt. When she was 20 years old, in the early 1980s, she went to a Papa Wemba concert in Kinshasa. She watched as he walked on stage wearing a floor-length black Versace coat. And she just couldn't stop looking at it.
She says when she saw that jacket, it was love at first sight, like a thunderbolt going through her. Yinda became a woman obsessed. Since Papa Wimbo was a distant friend of the family, she approached him and asked if he'd sell her the jacket.
He said, yes, $400. That was a lot of money. She was a young mother selling meat at a tiny market stall, making at most a couple dollars a day. But she immediately forked over her entire savings. Yinda never regretted her very expensive purchase. When she put on that jacket, people just looked at her differently. They spoke to her more respectfully. She felt tougher and braver. She became a Sapor.
It transformed my life. It made me known. She began spending more and more money on clothes and swapping outfits with other sepors. She even gave herself a new name. I'm Yinda Gabi, but people know me as Mama Mineur.
Mama Minor basically means youthful mother. Women's sapors are also known as sapus. When she joined the movement in the 80s, there weren't many. She's still one of the few. Most of her clothes are what we'd think of as menswear. But she says in La Sapa, it doesn't work like that. Baby, you know, it's a little bit of a form. Maybe it's a form, man.
A sapper is a kind of rebel. In La Sappe, there's no difference between men's and women's clothes. There was a freedom for women and a freedom for men also. If a man wants to wear a skirt, he can wear a skirt. By the 1980s, the sappers had totally rebranded European formal wear. The Belgians had required Africans to wear suits to prove their Europeanness.
American jazz artists, at least in the eyes of the Congolese, had worn suits to affirm their dignity. Sapphires were defining suits and fine fashion again. They weren't just cool, they were very Congolese. Coming up, the infamous dictator who tried to kill the Sapphire's vibes. That's after the break. But first, here's Roman with some ads. ♪
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Rules and restrictions apply. Not everyone loved Congolese people strutting around like the Sapor's in bright and flamboyant European formal wear.
One person who hated the idea was the president, Mobutu Sese Seko. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Mobutu is notorious for his wild exploitation of the DRC. He conspired with the CIA to have the Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, assassinated. And when Mobutu took over in the mid-1960s, he quickly became a kleptocratic dictator of note.
He enjoyed riding his yacht down the Congo and chartering Concorde jets for weekend trips to his personal castle in Spain. Stuff like that. Mobutu despised the way that Belgian colonists had tried to bleach the Congolese of their own cultures. Here he is explaining why he was fed up with Europe's influence in the Congo. To perpetuate the exploitation of black people by white people.
To exploit the black man, the colonizer wiped out African traditions, languages and cultures. In short, totally negating the black man so that he thinks, speaks, eats, dresses, laughs and breathes like a white man. As president, Mobutu took a hard turn towards nationalism.
He changed the country's name to Zaire, a word derived from an indigenous term for the Congo River. And he scrapped colonial city names like Leopoldville and Stanleyville. He also banned Western names like Marie and Pierre. For him, the point was to rid Zaire of the symbols of Belgian colonialism. Mobutu called this new policy Authenticité. He thought of it as a movement.
Congolese scholar Didier Mamungi says Mobutu thought of Authenticite as a movement to completely decolonize the Congolese spirit. For Mobutu, it was crucial that all Zaireans show unwavering faith in his new program. In a documentary about Mobutu, he's shown sitting on a throne made of carved wood and green velvet.
The dictator is watching, pleased, as a roomful of people robotically parrot lines, praising authenticity and Zaire. Mbutu also believed, like the Sepors, that how you dressed was directly linked to who you were. But he wanted people to look Zairean. In his early days as the leader of Zaire, when he was hobnobbing with Western kings and presidents, Mbutu typically wore a classic suit and tie.
But in the early 1970s, he did a fashion 180. If you've ever seen a photo of Mobutu, there's a very good chance he's dressed as follows. His trademark leopard skin cap, big thick Buddy Holly glasses, a carved wooden walking stick, and something that he'd invented that looks kind of like a cross between a lightweight blazer and a dress shirt buttoned up to the collar. He called this new creation the Abacoste.
Abacost is short for Abba le Costume, which literally means down with the suit. And it was Mobutu's personal response to the European suit and tie.
Well, it was his personal response that he more or less copied directly from China. It had what was then called a Mao color, but to make it a bit different, the color was slightly elongated with the scarf in the place of a tie. And voilà, the Abankost. And voilà, c'était ça...
As part of Authenticite, Mobutu had come up with a new national dress code. And he made the abacost the official office uniform in Zaire. And then, to round off his down-with-the-suit messaging, he actually made it against the law for men to wear Western suits and ties. But bans are made to be broken, and the dictator's anti-suit laws certainly didn't stop the sappers from continuing to flaunt their fanciest clothes.
And suddenly, dressing like a European dandy took on a whole new political connotation. Now, La Sappe was an act of rebellion against the eccentric dictator. La Sappe was a joy, and that alone was a revolt against Mobutu. It was a statement, because he said,
The Sapor's flashy, uber-expensive style was an act of resistance in another way, too. Because here's the thing. By the 1980s, Mobutu Zaire was melting down.
As part of Autenticité, he seized foreign-owned businesses and mostly let them rot. Commodities tanked, and the country was plunged into debt. Oh, and Mobutu was stealing crazy amounts of money, something like half the national budget each year. The dictator himself talked about how broke his country was. Fubres aires financierons malades.
Many doctors are examining a financially sick Zaire. Some want shock treatment, others want radical surgery. As Zaire's economy crumbled, so did its infrastructure.
And in the midst of those dark days, sepors could be seen strutting down Kinshasa streets, littered with potholes and gurgling with raw sewage, in their designer trench coats and thousand-dollar crocodile loafers. The sepors weren't just pushing back against Mobutu's dress code. They seemed to be an open rebellion against their country's bleak reality.
There was so little money to be had, and here they were choosing to blow it on, like, pocket watches and fedoras. As if to say, we refuse to let these difficult circumstances ruin our ambiance or scuff our fine leather boots. In a larger, like, grand scheme of, like, the social realities of what's happening in the Congo, it's frivolous, right? This is a frivolous activity. This is author Chantrelle Lewis again. But for me, anytime someone can...
use resources to create the type of reality that they want to live. And even if that is to imagine this luxury lifestyle, I believe that's an act of power and agency and resistance. Eventually, Zaire's economic situation forced many to leave the country.
That migration accelerated in the mid-1990s after Mobutu was deposed by a rebel army and then a brutal civil war erupted. As hundreds of thousands of Zairean migrants fanned out across the world, they took the culture of La Sappe with them, especially to Europe, where sappers now had regular access to brands and styles that had been hard to come by at home.
The tradition of safflower fashion duels found new life in the nightclubs of Paris and Brussels. European filmmakers began capturing safflower culture for a global audience. In a 2004 documentary, a group of saffowers are seen standing in a plaza in Belgium, boasting about the brands they're wearing, Comme des Garçons, Versace, and Yoji Yamamoto. One
One of the Sapors points at the camera and declares in Lingala, this is the story of wicked fashion. By the early 2000s, Sapors were getting attention around the world. At the same time, journalists and photographers started traveling to Africa to report on Sapor culture in Kinshasa and Brazzaville.
That's one of the phenomena that made the Sapir culture so prominent was that it occurred during a time when social media began to be on the rise. So now the Sapir were the subjects of everyday photographers, which then opened up their world to all of us.
Last year, Congo hosted the Francophone Games, a kind of Olympics for the French-speaking world. The opening ceremony in Kinshasa was a medley of traditional Congolese dance, song, and puppetry. And then, in the middle of the show, the stadium suddenly went completely black. A row of yellow taxis appeared out of the darkness, headlights blazing.
Then the car doors flung open. A bunch of people in pinstripe suits and foot-tall top hats and iridescent gold blazers started pouring out. Seeing the sapeurs on such a big stage, it was clear to me that they had gone mainstream in the best possible way. This bold, extravagant cult of luxury fashion used to be counterculture.
But when I was in Kinshasa, many Congolese told me that now, La SAP, c'est notre patrimoine national. La SAP is our national heritage.
99% Invisible was reported this week by Ryan Lenora Brown and produced and edited by me, Christopher Johnson. Mix and sound design by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and Keiko Donald. Fact-checking by Graham Heysha. Special thanks this week to Kristen Lasiste, Eve Sambu, Leon Sambu, Kati Toza, and our fixer in Kinshasa, Chopra Kabambi.
Also thanks to Nkumu Katalai, Emilia Mungu Mahandi for the voiceovers, and the Mfwambila Congo Dance Company. Roman Mars is our supreme magistrate and ambiance maker.
The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence.
We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, and this episode was produced in our studios and offices in beautiful, chaotic Midtown Manhattan. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our new Discord server. There's a link to that, and you can go off listening to every single solitary past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
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