"Wearing a suit and tie became an act of subtle resistance, a reclaiming of dignity and freedom."
Zemba Luzamba (born Lutanda Zemba Luzamba, 1973, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo) was born a year after President Mobutu Sese Seko's cultural revolution banned Western dress in favour of the abacost. Son of an ophthalmologist, a happy and versatile child who excelled at gymnastics, karate, dance and above all art, he studied art at school in his native Lubumbashi before enrolling at the Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts and Commerce in Lusaka, Zambia. Rather than return to the instability of the DRC, at twenty-seven he moved to South Africa, where he has lived since 2000, becoming a chronicler of the migrant African experience in a country with an ambivalent and often violent relationship to its own continent.
Over the past twenty-five years Luzamba has made the sapeurs his central subject. Members of the SAPE, the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes born in the Congo of the 1960s and 70s, the sapeurs turned Western tailoring into an act of quiet rebellion against Mobutu's dress code: to Luzamba, and to many Congolese, the suit and tie remain a language of dignity, defiance and freedom. He began painting them in 1995 as experiments on paper, recognised them as serious subjects by 2003, and by 2008 had made them the centre of his practice, inspired by pioneers such as the singer Papa Wemba. A contemporary realist, Luzamba renders his elegantly dressed men in oil, in bold fields of colour that detach them from concrete time and place, so that their scenes become universal: his paintings hover on the border of satire, appearing to mimic the colonial lifestyle of the post-colonial elite while simultaneously questioning it. Is this observation, aspiration or critique? The ambiguity is deliberate.
Luzamba's interest lies equally in how meaning is shaped by gesture, stance and setting, and in the deeper themes his elegant surfaces invite viewers to uncover: migration, brotherhood, environmental hazard, the wars of the Congo and the burden of the so-called "black tax", the financial expectation placed on successful Black individuals to support their families, at the heart of his 2025 London exhibition "Angalia Kwa Karibu (Look Close)". His solo exhibitions include "In the South: Paintings from 2004-2017" at the Stellenbosch University Museum (2017), "Déjà Vu" at the 5th Picha Biennale de Lubumbashi (2017), and shows with EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London, Berlin, West Palm Beach and New York (2022-2025). His work has been the subject of documentaries by CNN African Voices (2018) and Uvimba Media (2015), and of scholarship in Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. His works are held in numerous international public and private collections, including Zeitz MOCAA, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, the Fondation H, the Irma Stern Museum and the Durban Art Gallery. He lives and works in Cape Town.