No one knows what will happen on Wednesday, when the Congolese men’s soccer team plays in its first World Cup match in 52 years.
But the Democratic Republic of Congo has already beaten all comers in one way, according to its fans and fashion aficionados.
“When it comes to the World Cup of knowing how to dress, we’ve already won,” said Herman Ainsi, a resident of Kinshasa, Congo’s capital.
Members of Congo’s team turned heads when they strode through Houston’s airport last week in tailored black suits with a splash of leopard print. Pictures of them ricocheted across the internet as exemplars of modern African cool.
To many Africans and fashion historians, though, this is nothing new.
Their outfits — dignified, playful and undeniably powerful — are part of a long history that has made Congo the sartorial toast of Africa and beyond for generations. Congo’s sharp dressers, called “les sapeurs,” are known for extravagant tailoring, bold color choices and dandyism. Mostly, though, the sapeur style had one guiding principle: cool.
But the look has never been just about clothes, experts said. For generations, sapeurs carried a political message of pride and innovation in the face of adversity. That is still highly relevant in today’s Congo, amid insurgencies and a severe Ebola outbreak.
‘Making Fashion Talk Differently’
The sapeur style has roots at least as far back as the early 20th century, experts say, when people began to adopt, imitate and subvert the fashions of European colonizers.
After Congo and the Republic of Congo gained independence in 1960, a competitive energy in both countries fueled the development of a movement called La Sape (pronounced “sap”), a French acronym for the Society of Atmosphere-Setters and Elegant People.
Despite the hardship and poverty of those years, sapeurs sought out and remade designer items from Europe, and a subculture with its own distinctive slang, style and habits formed.
These young men used fashion to challenge European myths of them as “naked people or primitive people,” said Didier Gondola, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies modern African history and the Congolese diaspora.
“It’s almost like: ‘We’re adopting that, but we’re going to be beating you at your own game because we’re going to dress up in a way you can never do,’” Dr. Gondola said.
He sees the same sort of play in the team’s outfits: the sober Western suit with the vibrant African leopard.
“There’s a sort of ventriloquism,” Dr. Gondola said. “They are making fashion talk differently.”
The leopard is linked to Congo as a sign of power, as the eagle is to the United States or the bear is to Russia, he said. At home, the national soccer team is known as Les Léopards.
‘A Congolese identity’
Leaders have long seized on that imagery, and on fashion as a symbol. Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, wore a leopard-print hat during his brief time in office.
He was killed in 1961, and the man who took power a few years later, Mobutu Sese Seko, banned Western-style suits early in his long dictatorship, rejecting what he saw as the colonizer’s clothes. Soon, he became known for a leopard-skin hat and a cane, and sapeurs were treated as an affront to his push to make a new national culture.
But the sapeur look went global. Starting in the 1970s, Papa Wemba, a singer known as the king of Congolese rumba, helped project the style across the Francophone world with hit songs and sold-out concerts.
Long after their deaths, Wemba and Lumumba, whom many Congolese regarded as one of Africa’s foremost political visionaries, still loom large in the hearts of their admirers.
At soccer matches, one man, Michel Kuka Mboladinga, has started impersonating Lumumba, holding a statue-like pose in sapeur-inspired outfits. He gained such celebrity in Congo that its president intervened to get around visa restrictions and get him to the World Cup.
“This is just the beginning,” Mr. Kuka Mboladinga wrote on social media, with pictures of team members in their dashing outfits. “Sape is a Congolese identity.”
The World’s Runway
Congo’s stylish athletes are not alone. The men’s team is part of a tradition of sharply dressed African teams, and international tournaments have increasingly become a venue for them to express national identity and cultural pride.
“There’s been increased emphasis placed on the continent toward ‘Africanizing’ sports fashion,’” said Khensani Mohlatlole, a South African artist who researches African fashion history.
The Confederation of African Football has broadcast fashion shoots before tournaments, including last year, when it turned Morocco’s airport into a stage for athletes’ photos.
For this World Cup, the Ivorian team arrived in bright orange jackets with elephant decorations. Senegal’s deplaned in elegant gray and green looks with high-necked boubou-style collars.
For Congo, the look is a change from the team’s last showing at the World Cup, when the country was called Zaire. That year, 1974, the athletes wore traditional blue suits and lost 9-0 to what was then Yugoslavia.
This year, for Mr. Ainsi, the Kinshasa resident, they have already scored high points before the first kick.
