Africa clad in ‘secondhand’ boom

Nairobi / DPA

Sewing machines clatter and fumes
from charcoal-burning irons fill the narrow aisles hung about with lengths of fabric in the Gikomba Market in Nairobi, one of the largest second-hand clothing markets in Africa.
It is 7 am, and traders are already heaving large wooden carts fully laden with second-hand clothes pressed into plastic-covered packs weighing some 45 kilograms. The locals call them mitumba, Swahili for bundle.
By the time these mitumba arrive here in Nairobi, they have long gone through a transition from an affluent western wearer’s donation to tradeable goods. And that trade has many critics. During the 1990s it was frequently alleged that dumping old clothes from the prosperous West into fragile Third World economies destroyed nascent textile industries and jobs along with them.
That criticism has now become more nuanced. David Irungu takes delivery of two containers a month, each containing around 630 mitumbas. He pays around 90 dollars for each mitumba. He says he can sell them for around 20 dollars more.
Irungu pays his staff of around 10 from this modest profit. He also has to pay large import duties. Most of the clothing comes from the United States, Canada and Germany – cast offs that are carefully sorted for size and distributed all over the world, or otherwise processed if no longer fit for wearing.
Lucy Wangoi goes to Gikomba two or three times a week to buy items that she in turn sells at Toi Market on the other side of the Kenyan capital. “I select the items individually,” she says. Francis Muthaka deals in shoes that he buys at Gikomba. He also travels to China three times a year to buy new footwear, although its quality is not comparable with that imported from Europe, he says.
The new-clothing trade in Africa mainly sells cheap Asian imports rather than locally sewn garments. Suppliers of second-hand clothing do not see themselves as a significant obstacle to homegrown African garment making.
“An inability to compete with Asian products is currently seen as one of the main problems facing the African textile sector,” comments Thomas Ahlmann of the German organization Fairwertung, a network of non-profit collectors of old clothes.
Some blame also applies to import-protection regimes that are not properly policed. High import duties imposed by African governments — to raise revenue and also to protect local industry — often have the counterproductive effect of boosting smuggling.
Zimbabwe has banned the import of used textiles, but this is not reflected by reality.
One estimate is that 3 million Zimbabweans in a population of 14 million are dependent on the mitumba trade.
“We have read about the ban only in the newspapers,” says Susan Maka, who sells socks and underwear on Mupedzanhamo Market in Harare. Five or six dollars buys clothing for an entire family, she says. The figures show that second-hand clothing does have positive effects as well. An entire economic sector with hundreds of thousands of jobs, from skilled tailors to day labourers, depends on it.
“Second-hand goods are modern, the quality is good and the price low,” Ahlmann says, noting rising global demand for quality hand-me-downs. He points out that Germans flip vast tonnages of old clothes into used-garment containers which stand in the open in many cities, and there are simply not enough poor people inside Germany willing to wear the clothes.
After all, Germany also imports new Asian clothes at every price point down to ultra-cheap. That’s why the used garments are bundled up into mitumba, sold to clothing merchants and exported to other parts of the world. The German non-profits get cash for the bundles, and apply this to more pressing charitable needs inside Germany.