Glitzy malls, who needs them? When in Africa, shopaholics with an eye for a bargain need look no further than the nearest marketplace, says fashion fiend Lizzie Williams.
 I am trying to decide which of two Gap shirts to buy – one is blue checked, the other is bright white and more formal. Over my arm is a carrier bag containing a stylish Warehouse jumper and a Guess t-shirt. My partner is studying a pair of Caterpillar boots; he’s already bought a pair of Dockers combats and an Adidas tracksuit. You’d think we were shopping in London’s Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon, but no, we’re in the marketplace in Tabora, a dusty little backwater town in central Tanzania. We’re shopping for mitumba – second-hand clothes, commonplace in open markets throughout Tanzania, Kenya and many other African countries.
Second-hand garments from better-off nations have flooded into East Africa in the last decade or so. Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, cast-offs used to be called kafa ulaya, meaning dead man’s clothes. These days they’re named after the tightly-packed bales or bundles they arrive in – mtumba in Kiswahili. For many East Africans, mitumba is every season’s must-have: it’s thought that well over half the people living in Kenya and Tanzania wear second-hand items from the markets.
Thanks to the mitumba merchants, poor people have access to clothes they’d normally not be able to afford. My Warehouse jumper cost the equivalent of £2.10 and my Guess t-shirt, just 80p. It’s not a desire to emulate Westerners that makes people choose mitumba, it’s just a desire to be to be smartly turned out. In every society the way you dress makes an impression; these clothes enable people to maintain their dignity no matter how little they earn. They’re good business: many people in the region run a little mitumba stall on the side when things are tight.
Most importers buy their stock from charities or source end-of-line clothing from manufacturers in the West and Asia. Over two hundred containers of mitumba, each holding about ten tonnes, arrive in Mombasa each month and an estimated 3-4 million people are involved in the business as importers, transport providers, wholesalers and market traders.
Many of the traders prefer to buy bales that have been sorted in the United States, rather than in Africa. The US-sorted bales cost a bit more, but you get a lot less junk: the gems are less likely to have been skimmed off. In the world of mitumba, unbroken US-sorted bales are high-end luxury goods.
To subscribe or buy this edition, click here
Each mitumba trader sells from a rented stall where buyers rummage through the garments. Some clothes are sold by weight, others by item, with prices starting as low as 300 Tanzanian shillings or 20 Kenyan shillings (around 15p). Female shoppers have the better deal. Western women buy many more new clothes than men, and they discard more; they’re also more particular about the condition of their clothing. About 90% of the women’s cast-offs arriving in Africa are as good as new; only half of the men’s clothing is in a similar state, making quality mitumba for men more expensive.
Popular as the clothes may be, textile manufacturers and cotton farmers in Africa claim cheap imports have damaged their industry. Textile firms that have survived have done so by abandoning the mass market to diversify into niche areas like school or factory uniforms, or the fashionable local kikoi, a colourful cloth worn around the waist or shoulders. During my recent trip to Kenya, Fernando Garcia, managing director of Bata, Africa’s largest shoe manufacturer, appeared on TV and demanded that the government stop the importation of mitumba shoes into Kenya because this was threatening the local shoe manufacturing industry. A fair call perhaps, but since the arrival of mitumba, a lot more African children have shoes on their feet.
Some complain that mitumba has pushed aside indigenous clothing. Again debatable, as while certain ethnic groups such as the Maasai and Samburu stick to traditional dress, many other Africans were already wearing Western-style clothing long before the arrival of the mitumba bales. Another objection is that items which were donated to charity by Americans and Europeans should not be used to stoke a profitable industry. Some donors prefer the idea that their contributions will either be sold through charity shops or given to the needy for free. But if charities can raise more funds from selling clothes to mitumba dealers than from selling them through their shops, the causes they support do not lose out. What’s more, mitumba promotes trade aid in that donations made in the West support millions of jobs in Africa.
I am now in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. There are several mitumba markets here including Gikomba, the largest in East Africa, near the Machakos country bus station. My friend, a long-term Nairobi resident, offers to take me to a smaller market off the Ngong Road. It’s dubbed ‘Harrods’, she explains, because it’s the place where people from the city’s white community go to pick up labels – the traders know what the punters are looking for. You pay a little more than at the other markets but the stallholders are helpful, let you browse at your leisure, and don’t hassle or rip you off.
The market is a long line of shacks roofed with plastic bags and lined with mud and sticks. Ralph Lauren shirts and blouses from Esprit and Jigsaw are slung over wooden poles, and Nike trainers hang in strings like onions. In one stall crammed with hundreds of pairs of jeans, I tell the trader that I’d like Levi’s or Diesel, low rise, shorter leg length, and not too faded. He offers me his chair and within minutes I am presented with a selection to choose from. I walk away (after a bout of good-humoured haggling) with two pairs for less than £10. Another stallholder quickly affirms that I have a passion for linen as I finger through the clothes. As well as the jeans I leave the market with to-die-for Whistles white linen trousers plus a Benetton top, three Gap fleeces, and, the pièce de résistance, an unworn Katherine Hamnett shirt with the label still on.
And the Gap shirts back in Tabora? At about £1.50 each, I of course bought both. And it struck me that, with so many Gap items for sale in the mitumba markets, Gap could seriously consider running an advertising campaign in East Africa without even having to open a shop.
|
