In Africa, the West's castoff clothes are de rigueur, not demeaning. Nearly everyone has to buy used
LA Times, July 14, 2004
By Davan Maharaj, Times Staff Writer
Tossed off a flatbed truck, a 100-pound bale of used panties and bras, worn socks, DKNY suits and Michael Jordan jerseys lands with a thud amid a jostling swarm of shoppers.
Okech Anorue slits the plastic wrap on the refrigerator-size bundle he bought for $95 and dives in. There's bound to be a gem in there — like the faded leather bomber jacket once worn by Tiffany of Costa Mesa High School. That piece now hangs on the premium rack in his 5-foot-by-5-foot stall with a $25 price tag.
"These clothes make people's dreams come true," says Anorue, chairman of the vendors association at Yaba Market. "Everyone wears them, from insurance women, vendors, poor people to parliamentarians. When they put them on, you can't tell rich from poor."
Much of Africa was once draped in fabrics of flamboyant color and pattern, products of local industry and a reflection of cultural pride. But with half of its people surviving on less than a dollar a day, the continent has become the world's recycling bin. People scramble for 10-cent underpants, 20-cent T-shirts and dollar blue jeans discarded by Westerners.
A young man in the Congolese jungle wears a T-shirt that pleads: "Beam me up, Scotty." In a Lagos nightclub, a Nigerian ingenue models a used red negligee over a hot-pink halter top. A young Liberian fighter with an AK-47 assault rifle wears a tan bathrobe like a trench coat.
In Togo, the castoffs are called "dead white men's clothing." Few people in that West African country believe that a living person would throw away anything this good. Consumers in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania call the used clothing mitumba, the Swahili word for bale.
"Without mitumba, most Ugandans would be walking naked in the countryside," lamented an editorial in that country's leading newspaper, the Monitor.
Insatiable demand from village shops and sprawling urban markets has turned the West's castoffs into an industry that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Clothing is only the most visible example. Polluting refrigerators and air conditioners, expired medicines and old mattresses also are routinely shipped and resold here. Used vehicles imported from Japan dot African roads. Antiquated secondhand computers power many African governments.
The trade in hand-me-downs offers millions of Africans another means to endure their daily struggle with poverty. Shoppers get cheap clothes, and legions of vendors eke out a living one worn T-shirt at a time.
Mere survival has a long-term cost: The continent is losing the capacity to produce its own clothing. Although labor is cheap, Africans cannot make a shirt that costs as little as a used one. Every textile mill in Zambia has closed. Fewer than 40 of Nigeria's 200 mills remain. The vast majority of textile factories in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi are shuttered as well. Thousands of workers have lost their jobs.
"We are digging our own graves," says Chris Kirubi, a Kenyan industrialist who blamed secondhand clothing for the demise of his textile mill. "When you make your own clothes, you employ farmers to grow cotton, people to work in textile mills and more people to work in clothes factories. When you import secondhand clothes, you become a dumping ground."
full: <http://www.latimes.com/news/specials/world/la-fg-clothes14jul14,1,5275395.story?coll=la-home-headlines>
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