Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

Over the years, critics of the globalized secondhand-clothing trade allege that it undermines textile industries in developing regions, especially in Africa. It’s a potent claim that has intuitive power. Africa is the largest market for secondhand clothes globally, and has been for several decades. Meanwhile, its textile industries have declined precipitously since the 1980s. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, textile production dropped by 83 percent between 1990 and 1996. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, a textile industry that employed as many as two hundred thousand in the 1970s has dwindled to almost nothing. In Kenya, home to some of the world’s largest secondhand-clothing markets, a textile industry that employed as many as five hundred thousand people in the 1980s now employs fewer than fifty thousand. Geographers and other academics have created a small industry to prove the claim.