In 2016, the six-nation East African Community—whose members are Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and South Sudan—agreed to a ban on imported second-hand clothes and shoes. The embargo was set to start in 2019, but it has sparked economic and political controversy that reflects the complicated relationship developing nations have with the United States and other exporters of second-hand clothing. More recently, under fire from both internal and external forces [meaning US second-hand clothing exporters], the EAC modified its proposal, substituting a phaseout for an outright ban.

What’s this all about?

In African nations, imported second-hand clothing is an economic driver and a big business. Today in Uganda, for example, second-hand garments account for over 80% of all clothing purchases. Kenya receives an estimated $4.8 million in import duties annually from second-hand clothing. The huge second-hand clothing market also creates many jobs: clearing agents at ports, truck drivers, cart pullers, loaders, ironing and clothes repair workers, store clerks, and security guards, to name just a few.

East Africa imported $151 million of second-hand clothing last year, most of which was collected by charities and recyclers in the UK, Europe and North America. According to Oxfam, more than 70% of the clothes donated globally end up in Africa. In 2015 Kenya for example imported about 18,000 tonnes of clothing from Britain valued at around $42 million.

These figures explode the widespread assumption in the US that the shoes, outgrown kids’ clothes and no-longer fashionable dresses dropped off at charity shops are donated to needy people in African countries. In fact, according to one recent report, the US generates 1.4 million tons of used clothing annually, of which only 20 percent is sold domestically in thrift stores. As a result, the US exports 800,000 tons of used clothing annually, a significant portion of which is resold in African markets. One of the biggest used-clothing resellers, is Mid-West Textile Company of Texas, which purchases clothes that were donated to non-profit organizations such as Goodwill Industries.

The trouble with Mitumba

While the used-clothing trade creates jobs and government revenue in African countries, it engenders problems, as well.

According to Wikipedia,

 “n Africa, imported second-hand clothing is known as  mitumba. Mitumba is a Swahili term, literally meaning “bundles,” used to refer to plastic-wrapped packages of used clothing donated by people in wealthy countries. The term is also applied to the clothing that arrives in these bundles. One major receiving port for Mitumba is in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam.

Critics of the Mitumba trade note that the influx of cheap clothing is responsible for the decline of local textile industries. Here’s how one website describes the situation:

According to Andrew Brooks (Kings College, London),a debt crisis hit many African economies in the 1980s and 1990s following economic reforms recommended by the World Bank and the IMF. The reforms, amongst other things, opened up local economies to second-hand clothes.

The abbreviated version of the complex story is: declining incomes in subsequent years made locally produced clothes harder to afford. Imported secondhand clothing started flooding into African markets to provide an affordable option that was considered to be at least as good quality as locally produced garments.

Local manufacturing struggled to compete with international competition and factories were forced to close. Prior to this, the East African Community (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi) boasted a vibrant clothing manufacturing sector which employed hundreds of thousands of people.

In Kenya for example, a garment industry that employed 500,000 people was reduced to only about 20,000 garment workers today. It’s led some academics to argue that old clothing from the U.K. and U.S. was creating a post-colonial economic mess.

Pros and cons of the ban

These issues led the EAC to propose its ban on second-hand clothing imports in 2016. The goal was to revitalize the local clothing manufacturing industry and to create new jobs. One big challenge would be to ensure that the the hundreds of thousands of secondhand clothing workers – like the 65,000 mitumba traders in Kenya – largely in the informal sector, would not be left without work.

The ban idea quickly met some very strong resistance. While protecting local textile manufacturers, it was seen as a threat to a multi-billion-shilling group of importers, and they pushed back.

And, of course, US exporters of mitumba feel threatened, too. Under the African Growth and Opportunites Act [AGOA] enacted in by Congress in 2000 [and recently extended], East African nations get duty-free access to markets in the US if they meet certain conditions, such as improving the rule of law, human rights, and respect for core labor standards. Apparently, influenced by industry lobbyists seeing the import ban as injurious to textile exporters, the US has threatened to end EAC members’ eligibility for duty-free-market access.

Then, in May 2017, internal and external pressures led Kenya to back out of the EAC ban. But Rwanda announced that it would maintain its plan to ban mitumba. Finally, at a summit held in Dar Es Salaam on May 20, 2017, EAC partner states agreed on a compromise proposal, saying:

…for now, the best approach to phaseout second hand clothes is by supporting local industries instead of banning importation of the clothes once and for all.

The phaseout may be helped along by raising import duties on mitumba and by adding taxes on purchases of secondhand clothing, with the effect of making imports more costly in comparison to locally and regionally designed and manufactured clothing. It will be interesting to see howthe EAC nations manage this delicate balancing act.

So, we don’t have to stop donating to our neighborhood thrift shops just yet. But we all need to be aware of what happens to our easily discarded fast-food apparel and the effect that our wardrobe profligacy may be having on people in other parts of the world.

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The date was March 25, 1911. As employees were getting ready to leave work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan, a fire broke out on the ninth floor. Within minutes, fire spread uncontrollably as discarded remnants and packing materials strewn across the floor ignited. Panicked workers rushed to find a way to safety, but found exit doors locked. In just 18 minutes, 146 people—123 young women and 23 men—were dead. Many were found huddled together, their scorched remains piled up against the locked doors. One hundred feet below on Greene Street, the sidewalk was littered with the mangled bodies of young women who leapt to their deaths to escape the inferno.

The horrors of that day marked a watershed moment in the struggle for better working conditions for American laborers. Shortly after the fire, 400,000 people filled the streets of New York demanding change. In the months and years following the fire, determined workers organized and joined together in unions as never before. Labor laws protecting the rights of workers and reasonable fire-safety regulations were written and passed on the local and federal level.

But the conditions that led to the tragedy at the Triangle are still with us. And, sadly, it’s easy to ignore what’s going on because the sweatshops are no longer located along the avenues and side streets in Manhattan’s garment district, but are hidden from our view in cities and towns continents away. More than a century later, workers across the Third World produce the inexpensively priced clothing we wear by laboring in sweatshops where the working conditions are nearly the same as those at the Triangle. Every day exploitation, injury, and loss of life are facts of life in factories in cities whose names, like Dhaka and Savar, become known to us only through the most tragic events.

For example:

• On December 14, 2010, twenty-nine workers were killed in the Hamin Factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At the time the workers were manufacturing children’s clothing for Gap. Fire broke out on the tenth floor and then spread to the eleventh. Emergency exit doors were locked to prevent theft. In a scene horrifyingly reminiscent of the day in 1911, desperate workers, who knew the building had no exterior fire escapes, leapt out of upper-floor windows and landed on the street below. In addition to the twenty-nine who lost their lives, hundreds were injured.

• On November 24, 2012, one hundred and twelve workers were killed at the Tazreen Fashions Factory—again in the city of Dhaka—when a fire broke out on the building’s ground floor (where refuse was stored illegally). As the fire spread below, managers ordered workers on the floors above to ignore fire alarms and continue working at their sewing machines. At the time, clothes were being manufactured through a subcontractor for Walmart and Sears.

• On April 24, 2013, in Savar, Bangladesh (part of the greater Dhaka region), Rana Plaza—an eight-story-high building in which apparel was being manufactured for sale by Walmart, JCPenney, and Children’s Place—collapsed, killing 1,135 people and injuring 2,500. In violation of local codes, the building’s owners had added additional floors to a building built on swampy land and ignored warnings of structural deficiencies, forcing workers to continue working in a facility that proved unable to support the weight of heavy machinery and generators.

Today there are 4,500 garment factories in Bangladesh alone, employing more than 4 million workers, most of whom are young women and many of whom are children, at a wage of $37 a month, or 28 cents an hour. In 1911, the young women working in the Triangle factory were earning 14 cents an hour. Take a moment and think about those numbers. Adjusted for inflation and cost of living, that 14 cents from 1911 is worth $3.18 today. That means that garment workers working for 28 cents in the twenty-first century are earning one-tenth of what garment workers were earning more than one hundred years ago.

In the face of so much deprivation and exploitation, if we are the country that we would like to believe we are—that is, a country that claims to be committed to social justice—then there are some hard questions we should be asking of ourselves. The first of those is the most basic. “Will we bother to draw the connection between the clothing we wear and the working conditions of people who produce it?” The second is, “Do we care about what’s happening to those who work on our behalf halfway around the world?” The third is, “Once we know about unsafe working conditions, low wages, and exploitation, are we willing to ignore what we know and accept or tolerate it because we need (or prefer) low-cost clothing?” And most difficult of all: “What does it say about us if we turn away from the suffering through ignorance, willful blindness, or a lack of compassion?”

The context for those questions and perhaps a few answers may be found in a powerful video produced by the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights and narrated with passion by Executive Director Charles Kernaghan.

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“Dressing up means wearing a dress,” she said. “It means you put on a dress or skirt, high heels, and some makeup and you look good. AND, ladies, you’re not going clubbing; you’re skirt needs to reach past your fingertips when your arms are down.”

The National Honor Society members were supposed to dress up for induction of the new members, and I was astonished and confounded by non-inclusion of dress pants. I had turned to ask my friend why in the world none of the girls were wearing pants. That was her response to me in an imitation of our National Honor Society advisor.

Needless to say, I didn’t appreciate the insinuations. At all.

I’ve actually been told something fairly similar multiple times through the course of the past few weeks. It’s graduation season, and that means Honors Nights, Induction Ceremonies, Graduations, and all kinds of other flamboyant events we’ll all forget about in a few years. But I won’t forget the dress code. Nope. I’m much too riled up for that.

Let’s pick it apart one by one by one.

1. Since when does “dressing up” mean a dress???? The guys don’t have to wear dresses! And if they did show up in dresses, I bet most parents and teachers would throw a fit about how they were mocking school protocol or corrupting the youth or something equally preposterous and then refuse to let them participate in the ceremony! So then that rule only applies to females… which is simply antediluvian and antiquated.

2. Oh thank you so much for permitting us skirts. I suppose it would be too much to ask if we could wear pants? I forgot those were reserved for XY- individuals. My mistake. (Yeah, I’ll be wearing pants, thank you very much).

3. I really love high heels, I do, but I abhor this implication that they are the only shoes fit for women to wear. I will wear sandals or flats or wedges or plain old sneakers if I so choose and I will still participate.

4. I think we ought to be confident enough in ourselves not to need to don five pounds of makeup every time we leave the house. I mean teenage girls are inundated with calls for us to “love ourselves” and be “proud of our bodies” whatever they may look like (in order to counter the mass-media perception of women as big-breasted, small-waisted know-nothings). I can understand that yes, the theater lights will probably make us look fairly washed out and pasty and therefore a little makeup may perhaps do us some good, but the implications of what we were told was not necessarily that, but rather that we cannot look good without makeup- that women are incapable of being attractive without primer, foundation, concealer, rouge, eyeshadow, kohl, blush, eyeliner, bronzer, highlighter, brow pencils, tweezing, waxing, bleaching, plucking, tanning, dieting… Need I go on?

I want to address one more thing: a misconception about feminism. Yes, feminism is about breaking gender stereotypes (as I have already espoused)- in fact it’s about a complete obliteration of even the concept of gender stereotypes. That means girls can wear camo pants and guys can wear pink skirts if they want. That does not in any relate to homosexuality or heterosexuality or anything of that sort. Believe it or not, I have heard that argument against feminism as well. Feminism simply advocates for gender equality. That may often lead feminists to accept all people- homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, black, white, asian, and everything in between- but there are plenty of people with “stringent” beliefs in other areas.

Resuming my rant:

5.   Perhaps I’m just a prude, but I am perpetually astonished by the fact that people have to be reminded to cover themselves up in public- that guys have to be told not to sag their pants and show off their boxers and girls have to be explicitly told the minimum length of their hemline. Well, first off, do you know where the custom of sagging originated? Prisons. Men in prisons trying covertly to inform other prisoners of their homosexuality (that’s also where “swag” comes from; it stands for “Secretly We Are Gay”). Secondly, ladies, like the gentlemen, we too need to be aware of the messages we are sending with our clothing. There’s a lot that will be said about a woman’s morals, religiousness, intelligence, personality, “easiness,” etc. just by the way she presents herself (men, too, but predominantly women). I’m not saying it’s a good thing or an honorable thing or anything we should necessarily encourage; I’m simply saying it’s a fact of life.

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I buy too much clothing. Too many tops, too many pants, too many pairs of shoes.  I don’t wear them all, and when I have a cleanup spasm, I end up giving away the excess to whichever charity clothing drive calls first, looking for donations. Some of the items I donate probably get resold at thrift shops. Some is given away. Some of it may even make its way to clothing recyclers, who break down the textiles and use the fibers for new garments or textiles.

I’m recycling my clothes as fast as I can. But I fear that too much of it—stuff that doesn’t get sold, stuff that’s too worn out for anyone to buy–will end up taking up space again, not in my closet, but in a landfill.

It turns out that my fear is justified. According to National Geographic, clothing and household textiles, consisting of fabrics such as cotton, polyester, nylon and rayon, make up almost 5 percent of the total garbage in landfills. In North America, approximately 12 million tons of textile waste is generated each year—amounting to about 68 lbs. of waste per household per year. According to Soles4Souls.org, 300 million pairs of shoes are thrown away each year.

The reality is that a lot of clothes are going to end up in landfills, despite efforts to the contrary. So, a handful of manufacturers are developing biodegradable garments that will at least not make things worse.

Puma, for example, has announced plans to produce a biodegradable sneaker. According to the company, the sole of the sneaker will be made of biodegradable plastic and the upper of organic cotton and linen. After going through a shredder, it could become compost in six to nine months.

Another environmentally conscious company, called O1M One Moment, has begun marketing an innovative, multi-use shoe made of latex and other 100-percent-biodegradable raw materials.

And a design group called EarthBaked has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the creation of a biodegradable shoe called “PlusMinus.” According to EarthBaked, the shoe is durable, but it’s not intended to last a lifetime. But when it’s over, it blends back into the earth. EarthBaked’s product description explains how biodegradable clothing works:

Materials like wool and natural rubber make up the shoe and are intended to enrich the earth when properly disposed of. Wool is a naturally sustainable material because it’s soft, antimicrobial, breathable, moisture-wicking, water repellent, and durable. Once wool is introduced into soil, it works as a slow-release fertilizer. With a little heat, moisture and time, the fibers break down and release valuable sulfur and nitrogen into the soil.

Finally, Icebreaker Merino offers a line of earth-friendly outdoor wear made from the wool of New Zealand’s merino sheep. The company demonstrates the biodegradability of their products in a video, in which a t-shirt, buried for six months, is unearthed—well, what’s left of it. It’s an excellent object lesson in the advantages of biodegradable materials for clothing. They’re more expensive than the crap I usually buy, don’t wear enough, and donate. And if I buy them, my thrift shop truck-driver buddies won’t love me anymore. But if I can force myself to think longer term, they could be worth the price.

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