Dressed Like Kings

On swenking, Sapeurs, and dressing well.

By Nnema Épée-Bounya

Illustration by Iris Pope

I am in the back of a theater, the smallest theater I have ever been in. The seats are made of wood and have red velvet cushions. The woman next to me is eating a bag of chips extremely loudly, slowly, and self-consciously. The woman in front of me has an afro shaped like a heart, and I wonder if it’s intentional. Two middle-aged Black women sit beside me after arriving with the director of the film we are about to watch. The one closest to me is dressed in Asante cloth and is very irritated by the potato chip-eating woman to my right. The screen is large. Under it are two director’s chairs that say “Metrograph” on them. 

In Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and other parts of South Africa, there exists a subculture revolving around dressing impeccably. Oswenka is a tradition that was born out of the hostels and homospatial created by apartheid South Africa’s mining industry. The tradition revolves around men competing in pageants to take the crown of ‘Best Dressed.’ Dressed Like Kings (2007), a film by Stacey L. Holman, follows several of these men as they hustle for the perfect blazer, cuff link, or hat. 

Holman’s Dressed Like Kings was screened at Metrograph, an independent theater in Chinatown, in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The collaboration was conceived to celebrate Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the Costume Institute’s exhibition on Black fashion. Professor Monica Miller, Chair of Barnard’s Africana Studies Department, was the exhibition’s guest curator; her book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity serves as the central reference of the exhibition. 

Dressed Like Kings opens in the midst of a swenking competition, where the men’s exquisitely sharp ensembles contrast with the decaying yellow walls around them. The contestants, mainly in their middle age, posture and peacock for the judges and the crowd. Their movements are fluid yet controlled. An ironed pant leg is slowly, delicately lifted to reveal a patterned sock’s perfect match to its owner's pocket square. A blazer is slipped off and turned towards the audience to display its silk interior. A man who ordinarily spends his days in a worn work uniform prances and spins in a monochrome royal blue suit. The suits, which take around a year for the participants to put together, are only part of the performance of Oswenka. The rest is the swagger and showmanship, which proclaims to the judges, their competitors, and to themselves: “No one can dress better than me.”

There is a moment in Dressed Like Kings when Holman brings the audience into the home of one of the Swenkas, grounding us in reality. The Swenka, his wife, and two children all live in one room of a small apartment. “There is a family in each room,” his wife says multiple times as she walks around the house, trying to make the camera man, the director, and the audience understand. She points out a spot in the kitchen where people often sleep. As the camera steps inside of their family’s bedroom, it is hard to understand how an entire family can live in the space, which is not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A few scenes later, the Swenka’s wife sits with her two children as her husband shows us his favorite gold cuff links to the camera. Laughing, he wonders why his wife hasn’t left him due to his expensive swenking habits yet, and the question seems to hang in the theater.

I spoke with Miller about the connections she saw between the film, Superfine, and Afro-diasporic dress cultures. When asked about the inherent financial and personal sacrifices of swenking and related cultures across the diaspora, Miller explains, “You have to figure out what’s underneath it, and understand the complication of that desire—it’s not just wasted, there’s something there that is being valued. You can’t deny people pleasure. Sometimes it’s expensive, and sometimes it seems wasteful, but should it not be available? Black folks in so many different circumstances and contexts are denied or prevented, blocked from certain forms of expression, whether that’s cultural expression or artistic expression—just being mobile in the world.” Miller adds, “The thing I love about [Dressed Like Kings] is that line at the very end where somebody says ‘We do this because we wanna feel beautiful.’ There it is! Yes, there are tons of challenges given one’s economic background or what’s available, where you put your resources, but the pull towards beauty is very human and very necessary for people for whom the aesthetic realm is often denied.”

Towards the end of the documentary, one of the Swenkas notes simply that a man who practices Oswenka is a man that loves himself. Self-love permeates the entire film: Oswenka is an unapologetic display of Black masculinity despite the oppressive norms of Apartheid and its aftermath in South Africa. Though I hadn’t been familiar with Oswenka before the lights dimmed, so many memories flood my mind as the credits roll. I am reminded of the devilishly well dressed pastors on billboards in Accra and Abidjan, pleading for more poor people’s money to fund their mansions and bespoke suits. I am reminded of the photo albums filled with my uncle, my father, and his friends looking seriously into the camera in suits that practically swallowed them whole or were impossibly fitted—depending on the decade. 

During the screening’s Q&A, an audience member noted how they could see their relatives in the men of the film, a beautiful image of diasporic connection. I asked Miller if she experienced a similar feeling while participating in the film (she had a small cameo) and watching it at Metrograph. Miller saw connections between the Zoot section of Superfine and her great-uncle, Uncle Tommy. “Uncle Tommy was a jazz musician and he rode around in this beautiful light blue Cadillac. He always had on a tailored suit and a hat and cuff links, he was just everything. And I just think of him so much. I always think of Uncle Tommy when I am watching the film. It’s just so Black man.”

There was only one moment during the screening when the audience vocally reacted to the film. The entire theater erupted in laughter at the Swenka’s teenage son admitting that he prefers jeans to his father’s custom suits. There was humor to the candid delivery in which the son confesses this to the camera, but underneath his statement is a larger story. The conclusion of the film hints at the petering out of swenking as a prominent sub-culture in the country, as the next generation is not interested in the expensive and elaborate practice. Within this generational shift lies the death of swenking, but perhaps the birth of a new cultural form of expression for the next generation of South African men.  

When I think of dandyism—someone who “studies above everything else to dress fashionably and elegantly,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—I think of Africans. One of the songs that defined my childhood was Franco-Congolese singer Gims’ “Sapés Comme Jamais,” an anthem which encapsulates Congolese and other Africans’ propensity to dress and stunt constantly. The song’s title directly translates to “dressed like never before,” though that doesn’t quite capture its meaning—the phrase “dressed to the nines” gets closer to the saying’s essence. The verb saper is not just simply to put on clothes, it indicates someone dressed exceptionally well. A full proof way of knowing whether or not you are well-dressed is entering a room full of francophone Africans: If there isn’t a single “tu es sapée hein!” uttered, you may want to change. 

Gims sports some outlandish and extravagant outfits in the song’s music video, even appearing atop a white horse at one point. The end of the video features typical Congolese Sapeurs, who posture and flaunt their outfits for the camera. The video, which has almost 700 million views on Youtube, calls to mind the swenking competitions in Dressed Like Kings. Miller, too, notices the resemblance: “It’s so interesting to me that there are parallels between the Sapeurs, between the Swenkas, between folks in the Caribbean. It is a diasporic inclination to both dress well and to do that regardless of your circumstances.”

The Sapeurs have become touchstones of African cultures beyond the continent. Take Solange’s music video for her song “Losing You,” which heavily features the Sapeurs. The video is filmed in South Africa—not in the Congo where the Sapeurs are from. There may be logistical reasons for having the Sapeurs in South Africa rather than in their home country nearly 2,000 miles north (or featuring Swenkas instead). The result of this, however, makes Africa and its myriad cultures feel like a vague, catch-all backdrop for other parts of the diaspora to use. While it is not Solange’s duty to create a documentary on Swenkas or Sapeurs when setting out to film a music video, her video does something to highlight the care and consideration Holman put into Dressed Like Kings. Miller notes: “For me, watching that film, I felt like I was in it for a very long time. It does an incredibly good job of bringing you into the lives of these people. I do feel like it is a responsibility of some people when they are addressing Africa from afar to try to get close to that.” 

Africa, its people, and its complexity are so often generalized and abstracted into ideological reference points. African media that focuses on specific African traditions and, as Miller puts it, brings you into the lives of the subjects feels like a breath of fresh air. What Dressed Like Kings exemplifies is the very human—and very African—desire to love oneself through aesthetic endeavors. Africa's future is subject to infinite questions, but if one thing is clear to me, it's that it will most certainly be stylish. Africa is home to infinite questions and futures unknown, but it is clear to me that Africa’s future will certainly be stylish.