We have a war on our hands once again, and this time it looks like we are going to be fighting over dead white people’s clothes.
In
2017 a number of East African states imposed varying degrees of
controls against the importation of used clothing from America and
Europe, some arguing in favour of promoting and protecting our own local
textile industries, others saying it is undignified for our people to
be wearing clothes that have been worn by unknown people elsewhere.
These
clothing items have indeed invaded Africa. Everywhere you travel on the
continent you will see stacks of all kinds of textile in varying states
of freshness (or lack thereof), ranging from the passable — which you
may want to try on — to the disgusting types which look like they have
been used as mops in a bathroom.
These items have been
with us for quite some time, and our people have even found names for
them. In some communities they are called dead white men’s clothes.
Down in Mozambique they are known as roupas de calamidade or clothes of calamity. In my village they used to be known as Akafa ntwigana (when he died we were the same size). In Kiswahili, generally they are dubbed mitumba, a Lingala word meaning dead body.
Our
poverty has brought us to this place. We cannot afford to buy new
clothes, so we feed an industry that thrives on discarded wares, much as
we are used (sic) to used cars, television sets, home furniture, etc.
We are a used-products people. Even the drugs in many of our pharmacies
are used, in the sense they have passed their use-by date.
There is a sense in which we incline to support the used-clothes ban, for the two reasons stated above.
Rwanda’s
President Paul Kagame, who rides a high horse when it comes to Africa’s
dignity insists on the need to restore the self-esteem of the African,
which is important in enhancing our flagging self confidence. All the
members of the East African Community have been looking at opportunities
to industrialise their economies, and the textile industry looks like a
quick win.
But this determination to free ourselves
from the shame of these hand-me-downs is already pitting us against the
might of the United States, which sees the ban as an attack on its jobs.
An organisation calling itself SMART (Secondary
Materials and Recycled Textile Association) has been crying foul, and
the US government has responded by threatening to cut our countries out
of Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa). Why? Because the SMART guys
stand to lose about 40,000 jobs if we ban the importation of secondhand
clothes.
So, what is the deal here? That we agree to
continue losing the jobs we could have had in textile factories so that
we do not lose the jobs we are promised through Agoa? No one seems to
know what the tradeoff is between the two, but it smacks of clothing
imperialism for me.
It reminds me of the British
forcing China to allow the importation of opium in the 19th century to
the extent of fighting two wars in defence of the “right” of the British
to sell opium in order to make money for the Indian Raj. It was also
the British who forced Indians to abandon their handlooms in favour of
the textile mills of Manchester and Stockport.
Our
governments have to act smart. I do not believe that the advantages they
get from Agoa are sufficient for them to forego the economic and
technological gains inherent in a robust industrialisation programme,
especially if it is conceived as an integration endeavour for the
regional economic bloc and, eventually the whole of Africa.
Also,
it may be important to proceed gradually, step by step, so that we do
not impose total bans on imports before we provide alternatives for the
poor who cannot afford the luxury of new clothes.
The
ban could be smartly targeted; for instance, we could start by
completely outlawing the importation of intimate clothing such as
underwear, which could easily act as transmitters of vectors of
dangerous ailments. There is also the “dignity” thing about wanting to
protect your most intimate self from foreign things.
The
Native Americans were partly decimated from infections brought to their
continent in used clothing imported from a diseased Europe.
Jenerali
Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an
advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: ulimwengu@jenerali.com
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