The Dual Lives of Cape Town’s Congolese Dandies

Strutting down the streets of South Africa, a band of dashingly dressed migrants proudly display their loud and colorful subculture in a place that can be less than welcoming to outsiders.

Photos by Christopher Clark

It’s a particularly grim August afternoon in Parow, a dilapidated industrial suburb north of Cape Town. The usually busy streets are deserted, the sky is bruised and the winds kick up litter as a storm rolls in from the Hottentots Holland Mountains to the east.

But inside Nandi’s Bar celebrations of the Republic of Congo’s Independence Day are just warming up. The venue is hot, dark and windowless, and the fast, lilting rhythms of Congolese rumba are cranked up too loud for the aging, distorting speakers. For the almost exclusively Congolese clientele that are cocooned in here, the illusion of “home” is virtually uninterrupted by the rather hostile world outside.

There are only men on the dance floor; some have their national flag wrapped around their shoulders like a cape and all visibly take pride in the way they move their hips to the music. The women look on silently from the sidelines, vaguely interested at best.

But the dramatic entrance of Ulrich Christo…