Séverin Mouyengo, writer and sapper
Detail of the cover of the book “Ma vie dans la sape”, by Séverin Mouyengo ”.
© La Petite Egypt Bookstore.
Text by: Olivier Fourt Follow
5 mins
La Sape, the company of ambianceurs and elegant people, developed during the 1970s between the two Congos.
Séverin Mouyengo witnessed this before becoming one of its greatest protagonists.
With pedagogy, vitality and humor, he retraces this long journey which remained almost motionless for a long time between Pointe-Noire and Brazza.
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Sapology has its followers, its enthusiasts and its specialists.
This book is also addressed to others, to whom it promises a disconcerting journey to say the least.
This is the autobiography of Séverin Mouyengo, the "
bastard of the sape
", if we believe the title given to him one day in May 1974, during a party in Pointe-Noire, while 'he's not 19.
Séverin Mouyengo was first a
ngaya
, in other words a non-connoisseur, before lying to his mother to obtain the sum essential for the purchase of “
designer clothes
” in the most expensive stores in the center of Brazzaville.
He was then fourteen years old and plunged into a world that took him away from school and any other occupation for a while.
A process of reappropriation
The sapology on this side of the river then presents itself as a phenomenon of reappropriation of the dress codes of the former colonizer, with a predilection, therefore, for clothes or accessories such as cane or felt, which for some bring back to the late 19th century or early 20th century.
The association of colors - according to the 2/2 or 3/3 rule -, the interest in recent fashion, the way of "
taking the air
" with your "
accoutrement
" - of "
the diatance of 16h
" , hear the afternoon stroll through the streets of the capital, to the evenings of nightclubs - make undermining a discipline that grants universes very different from each other, but seems obsessed with the desire to appear and the need for social advancement.
This expression of the ascendant by appearance is found in several anecdotes in the book, from the "gentleman" given by the principal of the school when he comes to ask for a schedule adjustment, to confusion when taking up his post in the Water and Forests administration where his interlocutors constantly take him for a department head.
He also mentions at length a friendship of his adolescence with "
a young white woman
".
“
Among indigenous peoples
(pygmies), he writes elsewhere,
clothing corresponds to the logic of difference and status, it is devoid of any imaginative value.
If the assertion is perfectly debatable, it nevertheless betrays that the imagination of the sapper is haunted by colonial trauma, the humiliation of racial hierarchies and by the fear of contempt.
A non-violent challenge to the established order
The author expresses it very consciously in the appendices, preferring to stick in its own right to an experience which never becomes heavier with hindsight in analysis.
We cannot deny the elegance of this choice to the one who in 2004 was recognized as a “great Sapper”, without even having gone to Paris.
It was six years after the Civil War forced him to bury all his clothes, he believed for a few days.
When he returns home after a year, only a watch and a bracelet will have survived the onslaught of heat and rains.
Over two hundred costumes - most of the big names - and over three hundred shirts will have been rendered unusable.
In the meantime, five of his relatives have died of malnutrition.
He writes it at the very end of the book: “
In most cases, the sappers are young people of popular origin and from modest families, with reduced economic prospects, coming from traditional societies.
Behind this frivolity which exceeded the "socialist" governments of Central Africa, there is a challenge to "the established order", which is accompanied by an apology for "non-violence" and a desire to sublimate everyday life with beauty and joy.
This is also reflected in the many photographs illustrating this book with its tasty vocabulary, and the international recognition obtained late, which led him to travel from South Africa to Japan, for advertising spots or exhibitions.
"
The dandy gambles his life for want of being able to live it
" wrote Albert Camus.
And he added: “
When the dandies don't kill themselves or go crazy (…), they pose for posterity.
"
►
Séverin Mouyengo,
My life in the sape
, Librairie La Petite Égypte, 2021.
To listen on rfi.fr:
►
Tributes to Papa Wemba: the sappers greet their Pope one last time
.
►
Yvan Amar, “La Danse des mots”:
Les Sapeurs du français
.
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