The second-hand clothing trade and moral economic contestations over (re)distribution in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Most clothing consumed in Tanzania is second-hand. The long-established trade in such clothes – locally known as mitumba – has proliferated since the 1980s and has sparked much debate. Critics consider the country's dependency on the import of discarded clothes an expression of the country's disadvantaged position in the global distribution of wealth. But mitumba also give consumers the opportunity to dress fashionably and provide small-scale traders a livelihood. This article, based on ethnographic observations and interviews combined with an analysis of archival sources, describes these debates in Tanzania, which resonate with contestations over the second-hand clothing trade in other countries in the Global South. However, a description of traders' and consumers' motivations shows that the mitumba debate is also based in country-specific contestations over nation-building and citizenship in relation to questions of distribution, redistribution, and economic justice. The debate therewith is an expression of wider moral-economic contestations in Tanzania.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral economy
• second-hand clothing
• Tanzania
• redistribution

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Valence Silayo, Francis Ching'ota, Mohammed Mpando and Omary Chinowa for their support during fieldwork and remote data collection. I acknowledge COSTECH for the issuing of a research permit. I would furthermore like to thank the editors of this Special Issue and the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments on drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Cf. Isenhour and Berry (2020) on informal distributive labour and redistributive exchange in second-hand economies in the US.

2 Oxfam archives, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Oxfam PRG/8/5/1/2, Second-hand clothing: Dumping as development aid.

3 Scheld (2007) and Malefakis (2019) describe some of these – partly productive and creative, partly norm-breaching – trading strategies in detail.

4 Although Tanzania has recently experienced overall economic growth, it is mainly the higher educated who find jobs in the sectors driving this growth and who profit. Almost 50% of the Tanzanian population was still living on an income below the international extreme poverty line of $1,90 per day per person in 2018 (World Bank 2019, 3).

5 President Magufuli passed away in March 2021. I have not been able to analyse the economic policies of his successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, Tanzania's first female president, for this article.

6 I consulted governmental sources from the colonial period and the more recent archives of several charities in the UK National Archives and the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. In addition, I conducted a keyword search in the online archives of several East African newspapers. I collected and analysed 70 newspaper articles in English and Swahili to gain an overview of current perspectives on the trade. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that cut my fieldwork short, I was unable to consult archives in Tanzania. The description of post-independence policies in Section 5 is therefore based on literature.

7 As I had stayed in the region before, I used my existing networks to purposefully sample consumers from different economic backgrounds, both men and women, with whom I conducted interviews in Swahili. I approached traders, auctioneers and tailors for short interviews at the auction site and market in Mtwara Town with the help of an assistant, whose presence would ‘break the ice’. In addition to the interviews in the south, I conducted four interviews remotely via Skype with middlepersons (three men, one woman) based in Dar es Salaam in the first months of 2021. For these interviews I used snowball sampling through a trader whom I had already known since 2010 and whose success in the business sparked my initial interest in the topic.

8 The National Archives of the UK (TNA), CO/533/404/9, Second-hand clothing: Importation prohibited.

9 TNA/CO/533/404/9, Second-hand clothing.

10 MS. Oxfam PRF TAN 297, Lindi/border region relief need assessment; SOAS Library, WOW/250/Box 250, Annual Review 1964.

11 MS. Oxfam PRG/8/5/1/2, Second-hand clothing. I found this information in a print-out of a 1996-article by Hoebink in Derde Wereld Magazine, which was attached to an internal paper from Oxfam's policy department.

12 TZS 758. I consulted the updated version of 2017.

13 All English translations of Swahili quotes in this article are my own.

14 SHC-exports to the East African market at its peak in 2012 represented a value of only $43 000 000, equivalent to 0,003% of US exports that year (Frazer 2018).

15 The majority of mitumba traders are men. Although I also encountered some successful female traders, the trade clearly has certain gendered dynamics, which I cannot analyse further in this article.

16 There were a handful of tailors present at this auction site. They were there to repair the clothes when needed, but also to tailor them to local demand before they were sold on. In addition, most men putting up the clothes for sale at the auction did not own any bales themselves but were hired for the job by middlepersons on a casual basis. The presence of tailors and auctioneers indicates that creative marketing strategies are essential for success in the trade. I cannot discuss these strategies further here, but they have been discussed elaborately in other literature. Specifically for Tanzania, see Lubuva (2006), Ogawa (2006) and Malefakis (2019).

17 These revenues are indeed considerable, considering the large quantity of imports. Moreover, Tanzania's custom duties on SHC are also relatively high, namely 35% of the clothes' value, compared to 25% for most other consumer goods including new garments (Tanzania Revenue Authority 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Gerda Kuiper

Gerda Kuiper, PhD, University of Cologne (2019) is a cultural anthropologist. She is the author of Agro-industrial labor in Kenya: Cut flower farms and migrant workers’ settlements (2019). Her main interest areas are economic anthropology, environmental anthropology, Eastern African studies, and interdisciplinary cooperation.