Sharp suits, warm beer – Guinness, sapeurs and the seduction of Congolese fashion

A Guinness ad featuring a group of splendidly-dressed men from Congo-Brazzaville, called Le Sapeurs, is making a splash online. The men in the ad (below) are members of Le Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, a group of middle class Congolese in both Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who collect, assemble and model sharp, colorful suits that evoke Parisian fashions of decades ago. The message of the Guinness ad comes in the opening line of the voiceover: “In life, you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are.” You may carry bricks or paint car parts for a living, but you can choose a life where, for some hours of the week, you are a fashion icon and a hero to your neighborhood.

AdWeek featured the ad, and an accompanying documentary, as their ad of the day, noting “When global marketers portray Africa, the goal is usually humor or pity. Rarely do brands treat Africans as cultural equals, much less as inspirational role models.” The BBC, Slate and The Guardian have all commented on the video, most noting that it’s surprising to see an affirmative, inspirational African narratives that actually features Africans as the main subject (as opposed to, say, GoToMeeting’s “Kenya Water Project”, in which hip, wired young people across the world – none in Africa – get together to “save” a distant other.)

This ad follows another striking Guinness ad, in which a spirited game of wheelchair basketball is revealed to include one wheelchair-bound player and five players without disability, who are learning to play wheelchair basketball as a way of spending time with their friend. The video has drawn praise for being heartwarming and compelling, and critique for being patronizing to the disabled and for not correcting a more general problem, the invisibility of the disabled in advertising except as props to demonstrate the moral courage of others. I found the ad more moving than manipulative, but then again, I spend far more time thinking about media portrayals of Africans than I do about media portrayals of the wheelchair-bound, so I’m far less attuned to the critiques the commenters raise.

I’ve been thinking about possible critiques of the Guinness Sapeurs ad and have come up with three thus far. One is that Guinness is pretty late to the game in featuring Les Sapeurs. Spanish photographer Héctor Mediavilla released a striking set of photos of Sapeurs in Brazzaville in 2003 (see also this collection), and Daniele Tamagni published a beautiful photo book of Sapeurs in 2009. Sapeurs came to mainstream attention last year when Solange Knowles featured several Congolese sapeurs in the video for her song “Losing You”. And news outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR and others have examined sape from the perspectives of dandyism, the sapeur disapora in France, the cost of being a sapeur, and the contrast between the flair of the sapeurs and the stark nature of their surroundings.

Solange Knowles, “Losing You”

These last points – the cost of being a sapeur in an extremely poor country – is the core of another critique of the Guinness ad, and of sape more generally. At its heart, sape is a consumerist movement, where the creativity involved is in the hustle to assemble expensive outfits by having them sent from family abroad, or by borrowing clothes from other sapeurs. Stephanie McCrummen’s feature on sape in Kinshasa focuses heavily on an apparent obsession with the authenticity of the clothes and their expense. Is sape just a more elegant obsession with bling, a form of posturing that focuses primarily on the cost and inaccessibility of objects rather than a deeper form of creativity? Is there something perverse about wearing a pair of alligator shoes that cost half the per capita income of a nation?

A third critique would note that Africans often get credit for style and fashion, but rarely for weightier pursuits. It’s not especially radical to acknowledge the color and creativity of African music, art, and fashion, but would be far more exciting to see Guinness celebrating the startup culture of the iHub or the new model of African universities emerging at Ashesi University.

All that said, I think Guinness is trying to do the right thing in trying to offer a surprising and different picture of central Africa to viewers who likely associate the region with conflict, if with anything at all. The opening shot of the Guinness ad shows a field on fire, which immediately made me brace myself for an all-too-typical narrative of Africa in conflict. The ad pivots within the first second, showing us the burning of a sugarcane field as an example of the quotidian labor the sapeurs engage in, a set up for their transformation from laborers to fashion plates. It works – for me, at least – because it acknowledges what we expect to see about Brazzaville, then shows us something unexpected, surprising and inspiring.

Trailer for Michael Power ad, “Critical Assignment”

It’s worth contrasting this ad from Guinness with a previous campaign, which centered on an African superhero, Michael Power. Power – played by a Jamaican who was raised in Britain – was a James Bond figure, always righting wrongs committed by corrupt politicians and their foreign backers, and relaxing at the end of a hard campaign with the damsel he rescued and a bottle of Guinness. The campaign was enormously successful on the continent, but virtually impossible to imagine running in other global markets. By contrast, the Sapeurs ad was intended for the UK market, but could easily run on the continent, and features a form of actual African superheroes, not an imaginary one.

In “Rewire“, I talk about the importance of culture as a pathway towards understanding the history, politics and challenges of unfamiliar people and places. My student, Catherine d’Ignazio, is exploring this idea in her project Terra Incognita, which allows you to monitor where in the world you encounter through your web browser and get introductions to unfamiliar countries. Catherine talks about the importance of “seducing” a reader to pay attention to a topic she’s not already interested in, offering images, video, maps and compelling narrative to capture attention to the unfamiliar.

I found myself seduced by Guinness’s ad into spending a chunk of my day learning about the political and cultural significance of sape, which included a dive into the history of Congo-Brazzaville’s civil war, and into Mobutu Sese Seko’s drive for “Authenticité“, or the Zairianization of the current Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Mobutu models the abacost while hanging with Caspar Weinberger, courtesy of Wikipedia

As As Joshua Keating notes in his piece for Slate, sape is, in part, a reaction to Mobutu’s attempts to cleanse Congo of colonial influence. Authenticité involved replacing colonial names with indigenous ones, and banning western suits and ties in favor of the abacost (short for “à bas le costume”, French for “down with the suit”), a local variant of the Mao suit. As Mobutu and his corrupt cronies lost popularity, wearing western fashion became a form of rebellion. Soukous musician Papa Wemba became the leader of this rebel faction, proudly wearing French fashions purchased on his international travels and advertising the labels in interviews and in his songs. The contrast between Mobutu’s ban on western fashion and the embrace of the sapeur movement by the nation’s most popular musician helped expose the dissatisfaction of ordinary Zairians with Mobutu’s one man rule. (I’m thankful to wikipedia Skomorokh, whose contribution to the Sapeur article has somehow not been incorporated to the main article, which is, unfortunately, pretty weak. Skomorokh points to sapeur as a form of rebellion, linking to James Brooke’s 1988 article on sapeurs in the New York Times.)

I’d not expected to spend today thinking about cultural rebellion against autocrats, but then again, I’d also not expected a global beverage company to promote Congolese culture to UK beer drinkers. Perhaps the admen and women at BBDO took their own script seriously: In life, you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are. I’m glad Guinness has chosen to be a brand that’s trying to feature what’s unique, wonderful and positive about Africa.