When I started blogging/tumbling a little over a year ago, one of the first posts I wrote was about the Sapeurs of Brazzaville, young Congolese men who live in abject poverty, but beg, borrow and steal in order to dress themselves in immaculate Gucci loafers and 5,000-dollar Prada suits.

Well, I’ve been neglecting my tumblog recently, as I’ve been rather busy with Chembe Ventures. A few nights ago I checked the Google Analytics stats for Africafeed.com and noticed that in the first week of December I was getting over 1,500 unique visitors a day, more than 5 times, ok, ok, more than 20 times the usual daily traffic.

It turns out that at the end of last month, the Freakonomics bloggers at the New York Times linked to that old blog post when they wrote about Dan Ariely’s advice on how to “splurge less”; for example by “equating expensive wine with gallons of milk and making paying hurt a little more”. An example was made of the poor Sapeurs who “lament they didn’t see their Prada suits as houses for their families.”

In any event it’s great to see more people mentioning the Sapeurs. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the inevitable arrival of the first coffee table book on the subject. Enter Gentlemen of Bacongo by Daniele Tamagni, published by Trolley Books of London.