The Buffalo Bills

Le Triomphe de Buffalo Bill

In the late 1950s, Leopoldville (now Kinshasa, in the DR Congo*) got its first movie theaters. The rate of unemployment was very high at the time, so the mostly-uneducated youth of the city spent a lot of their time watching Westerns. This grew into a sort of obsession, and eventually gangs were formed based on the culture in the films. These kids were collectively called The Bills. They wore cowboy outfits, developed their own dialect - Hindubill – and named their territories based on locations in America and movies they’d seen (like “Texas” and “Godzilla”).

The Wikipedia article has a little more information.

* That’s the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not to be confused with Dr. Congo, the shadowy antihero of a short film I’m going to produce some day.

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