Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

Since the mid-2000s, Ghana’s labor-union leadership has blamed two related phenomena for the decline of the country’s once-thriving textile industry: pirating of Ghanaian brands and styles by low-cost Chinese firms and the large-scale evasion of Ghanaian custom duties by East Asian exporters.5 They have a point. For example, production of kente cloth, the colorful Ghanaian fabric once exported around Africa and the world, employed thirty thousand people as recently as the 1980s. Since then, Chinese counterfeits have flooded the market and devastated producers (Ghanaian kente manufacturers employ fewer than three thousand today).6 At Ghanaian markets, buyers can expect to pay far more for locally produced, and so naturally opt for low-cost Chinese imports. The situation for Ghanaian kente producers is so dire that a government-sponsored initiative to encourage people to wear traditional Ghanaian clothes on Fridays is widely derided as a jobs program for the Chinese.