At 9am on a Monday morning, the used clothing vendors at Chiquelene Market in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, are still unpacking their wares.
The contents of bales of clothing purchased from wholesalers in the city centre are inspected with care: a good batch containing newer, more fashionable clothing can yield good sales; a bale containing more worn items in dated styles may mean a difficult week ahead.
“Sometimes I have to throw them away,” said Angelina Arnaldo, as she sorts through a pile of underwear, separating boxers from briefs.
The sale of clothing donated to charities in Europe and North America has supported Arnaldo and her seven children for 17 years. On a good day, she takes home around $10.
“It’s easier than selling food because it doesn’t go off,” she explained, as a man wearing a “Merry Christmas” baseball cap hands her 5Â 000 meticais ($0.33) for a pair of boxers emblazoned with cartoon characters from Snow White. “But business was better before — these days, people don’t have money even for used clothes, and there are more people selling than before.”
Shoppers with less time and more money browse through stalls displaying new clothing near the front of the market, but most people duck past the cheaply made imports from China, Dubai and South Africa, and squeeze their way down narrow, maze-like passageways, dodging puddles and young boys hawking cigarettes, in search of the used clothing section.
Hundreds of vendors compete for business in this sprawling market, one of several in Maputo, where large quantities of used clothing change hands. Some specialise in jeans; others sell only men’s white shirts or women’s swimwear. Vendors report that most of the clothing comes from Canada, but, judging from the labels, most of it originated in the United States and was shipped via Canada.
T-shirts reveal the most about their origins. “Wrestling Camp 1983 — Portland, Or”, reads a well-worn yellow shirt. “Life’s a Beach — Laurie’s Bar-mitzvah, Oct 12, ’96”, announces another. A red T-shirt with a picture of a naked lady trumpets, “May’s Club — Rose City’s First Topless”.
Maura Marina is shopping for the baby she is expecting in a couple of months. She buys clothes for her entire family from Chiquelene Market — not, she said, because she cannot afford new clothes, but because she prefers the quality.
Marina insisted she drew the line at used underwear but vendors and wholesalers report that women’s bras are one of their biggest sellers. Trying on a bra for size, another woman said she also preferred the quality of used clothes from Europe and North America, but the real clincher was the price — a new bra would set her back around $20, compared to around $1 for a used one.
In an effort to protect local garment manufacturers, several African countries have imposed bans on the influx of used clothing but, in Mozambique, where the textile industry has not recovered from a long civil war that ended in 1992, used clothing has become an integral part of the economy.
Bipin Lalgi manages one of about 14 used clothing wholesalers in Maputo, where all the bales filling his store arrived in a container from Toronto. A 45kg bale sells for between 1,5- and 2,5-million meticais ($100 to $170), depending on the quality and type of clothing it contains.
“If they stopped us importing these clothes, many people would suffer from poverty,” Lalgi said. When the shop opened in 1996, he could shift around 50 bales of clothing a day, but in recent years competition from other wholesalers has seen sales decline to around 15 bales a day.
The president of the Textile Federation in neighbouring South Africa, Walter Simeoni, argues that many more jobs could be created in the long term by banning imports of used clothing and investing in local industry.
After thousands of job losses in the sector, South Africa implemented such a ban in 1999. Although Simeoni conceded that the ban had not prevented South Africa’s textile industry from continuing to flounder due to other factors, including the massive influx of cheap clothing from China, he maintains that a similar ban would benefit countries like Mozambique.
“I know there’s a moral issue attached, and that governments say, ‘we have poor people who’ve got to have access to this used clothing’. On the other hand, as long as they have the used clothing, they won’t have an industry and, in the long term, it’s more important to build up an industry,” Simeoni explained.
Back in Maputo, 24-year-old Pedro Samuel is selling secondhand T-shirts from a two by one metre space at Xipamanine Market. He estimates there are 1Â 000 vendors selling used clothing at this market alone.
“At the moment, this is the only job I can do,” Samuel said, explaining that he started helping his father sell used clothing when he was aged just 11. “People buy from me because they can’t afford to buy new,” he shrugged. — Irin