![]() ![]() You always need to be clean with the Sapeurs, you are in a clean place with clean people. “I started in 1980 when I was very young,” said the market saleswoman and hairdresser, who was wearing a pressed pink dress shirt and a purple French suit when I met her. However, it wasn’t until 10 years ago that women were formally allowed into the group.Įdith Loubaki, 49, was one of the first Sapeuses publicly accepted as a Sapeur, although she has been dressing in male drag since 1980. The pacifist Sapeur movement waxed and waned throughout the 20 th Century but was revived in the 1970s by musician Papa Wembe and again in 1999 after the vicious civil war in the Republic of Congo. “It’s a way of presenting their lives and being somebody in a society that doesn’t give you many opportunities.” “It’s not only about spending a lot of money on the clothes, but also the way they speak, the way they move,” Hector Mediavilla told NPR. “Captivated by the snobbery and refined elegance of the Coast Men’s attire, Congolese houseboys spurned their masters’ secondhand clothes and became unremitting consumers and fervent connoisseurs, spending their meager wages extravagantly to acquire the latest fashions from Paris,” writes Didier Gondola in the essay “La Sape Exposed!: High Fashion Among Lower-Class Congolese.” Soon, the slaves found a way of rebelling. These are the Sapeuses, a branch of part of Le Sapeurs, aka the “Society of Elegant Persons of the Congo.” Formerly an all-male group, Sapeurs have been around since the beginning of the 20 th Century, when colonial “masters” would gift their old clothing to their slaves. Anna Loubinzi, 32, is training her young son to be a Sapeur. They are also fighting for female equality in a region decidedly not known for it. There are thriving drag-king scenes in London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles - and, most subversively, Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo, where these women are out-dancing, out-posing and out-dressing their peers. At this point, most people know about drag queens - thanks, RuPaul! - but fewer are aware of drag kings: women who dress as men. ![]()
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