John’s Blog

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a long time, and a friend from another web discussion forum (to which I’ve added a link to the right) gave me a good excuse.

People wear t-shirts here.  Many people wear only t-shirts.  Many people only wear one t-shirt - the same one every day.  Now I’ve been told that having writing on the front of your shirt - “Harvard,” “Abercrombie and Fitch,” “I’m with stupid,” etc is an American invention and that Europeans found it terribly exotic and bizzare at first (this would have been before I was born, I think).  However, it seems that the world is growing more and more accustomed to this phenomenon (as is true of many things American), and most of the t-shirts here have writing on them.

Among the most common t-shirts here are ones that are made for political campaigns.  They are kind of all the same - there is usually a photo of the candidate with their name and the name of their political party encircling the photo.  Then at the bottom there is more specific information about what post they’re running for, which community they want to represent, etc.  I was dining with friends the other day and talking about the relative unpopularity of Kabila in Kinshasa.  They wanted to know more about this because it seemed to them like all they saw was Kabila t-shirts all around town.  This is totally true.  It is one of the most common t-shirts to see.  But what they didn’t realize is that these t-shirts are all over town because they were given out for free, and many people only had one dirty t-shirt to wear, so they jumped on the opportunity to have a clean, fresh one, regardless of what the writing on it implied.  I’m sure there are many Kabila supporters among the ranks of the Kabila-t-shirt-wearers, but I’m pretty sure there are many who have no sense of a connection between the words on their chest and their identity, and I have a bunch of stories to prove it:

The other day, walking through Matonge, I saw a large Congolese woman who must have been in her 60’s with a black shirt with lettering in a wacky font that said “don’t blame me if I’m having a blonde moment.”  Early in my trip I was at a concert rehearsal and saw a young man in a white t-shirt covered in what appeared to be pink puff-paint.  In fact, it was pink puff-paint, and was somewhat awkwardly applied.  Also on the shirt, there was writing in black marker that seemed to catalog, in different hands, a bunch of inside jokes from some American summer camp or something.  I looked closer as he walked by me, and in large, adolescent lettering across the front of the shirt in pink puff-paint, it read: “Natalie.”  Hanging to dry on my neighbors’ line, which is just outside my kitchen window, I saw a shirt that had, cradled in a swoosh and a picture of a softball, the words, “The Slugger’s Wife.”  I wondered to myself if the person who actually wore that shirt was even a woman, much less a wife.  One shirt that was genuinely funny, but made moreso because of the irony, was one that looked like an eye exam, but instead of the letter “E” at the top all by itself, it had the letter “I.”  The next line was three smaller letters spelling ”see,” and it continued to say “stupid people reading my shirt.”  I laughed out loud. 

Then there’s the “Juicy” or “American Princess” collection, which kind of mystifies me in the U.S., but people here seem to understand what those mean, and they are usually worn in a manner that is appropriate, at least to 20-ish-year-old Americans.  Then there’s all of the university shirts, although I learned soon after leaving Ann Arbor, Michigan, that even in the U.S., seeing someone with a Michigan shirt doesn’t necessarily mean they went to the same school I did at any point.  This is the exception, though, I think, in the U.S.  I wish I remembered more t-shirt stories - I try to write them down when I can.

OK I’m running off to town.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under Congo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.