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Where Your Old Clothes Go.
Yes, most likely, a portion of the 2nd-hand clothes donated to charities in the U.S. and Europe end up in places like this, the Memorial Market in Moshi. Collected clothes are crushed into cargo containers and loaded onto barges that slowly make their way to developing countries.
The final destination is a place like this, a giant marketplace warren where hundreds of vendors spread over several dozen acres hawk their wares. The marketplace is so big it has its own neighborhoods of a sort. There is one section devoted mostly to shoes. Dozens of women sit in stalls and on the ground with perhaps 20 to 100 shoes each around them, hoping to make a few sales. In other parts of the marketplace you’ll find vendor after vendor selling mostly shirts, or pants.
You’ll see all the top brands here - Banana Republic. Talbots. Abercrombie. Ecologie. The t-shirts are an eclectic bunch as well (samples: “Southwest Community College” and “Summit Healthcare New Employees Picnic” and “Steve Cedrone Softball Tournament, Boston Police Department, September 1998”). Quality varies but much of it is a wash and an iron away from being fine. I bought Maria a Banana Republic top for Valentine’s Day for about $1.50.
So, all good news, right? Surplus clothes in the West aren’t wasted, but rather sent to provide a capital base for hundreds of salespeople, and affordable clothing for a whole community. Perhaps. But in the world of comparative advantage, making their own textiles is actually something Tanzanians are good at. They make beautiful, elegant and colorful clothes, especially dresses, that are extremely eye-catching admidst otherwise drab surroundings. Only Maria, who was here four years ago, reports many, many fewer people around town are wearing them. The proportion wearing Western leftovers is way up. Increasingly, it is sub-groups like the Masai who typically are seen in native styles.
You can also see in downtown Moshi a couple dozen tailors lining the streets with their sewing machines. They’ll hem items or even put something together for you out of the beautiful cloth for sale in stores behind them. Only their ranks have thinned considerably as well in recent years - also victims of the flood of low-cost imports.
So here you have a craft people here are exceptionally good at, and could perhaps be a tool to start building some kind of urgently needed local industry around. Only it’s destroyed by a well-intentioned but destructive bomb from abroad that overwhelms the market, in the form of all of our used clothes, as far as the eye can see.
