La sape des mikilistes : théâtre de l'artifice et représentation onirique
1999; Éditions de l'EHESS; Volume: 39; Issue: 153 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3406/cea.1999.1963
ISSN1777-5353
Autores Tópico(s)French Urban and Social Studies
ResumoAbstract The Mikilists' sape: A theater of ingenuity and dreams. — Sape is a clothing style adopted by some young people from the former Zaire or Congo who are living in Europe, mainly in Paris: their lives are based on acquiring expensive clothes bearing designers' labels. Underneath appearances however, the attentive observer can see the symbol of an ambiguous meeting between Africa and the West. Colonization, the white man's burden, intended not just to regenerate the Negro's primitive spirit but also to tame and train his body, and clothe naked people. During the 1920s in Brazzaville, Europeans paid their "boys" by giving them their old clothes to wear. Out of that arose sape not just as the duty to be elegant or the desire for social status but as a relentless quest for an identity to be worked out of the meeting between Europe and Africa. Sape appropriates material signs created by the West for a dream trip leading these young Africans from the "bad cities" to the "cities of light", from Kinshasa and Brazzaville to Brussels, London and especially Paris. The aim is to redeem one's body and exhibit it in the West far from the chaos in Africa. Sape has all the characteristics of a subculture that not only attacks the social order and scrambles this order's reference-marks; it also endeavors to reconstruct reality through the dreams egotistical appearance offered to followers, the sapeurs.
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