The family has needed some new clothes for a while. Felt slightly paralyzed because we had planned no trips home anytime soon, and even lousy new clothes are mostly expensive, thanks to import duties designed to force people to rely on local products.
So we went to a Nairobi mutumba market, a maze of tin-roofed stalls where regular Kenyans do their shopping for shirts, shoes, backpacks, hats, luggage, even underwear. Everything in the mutumba market is second-hand -- donations by good-hearted folk around the world who no doubt believe their old clothes will be handed out to the poor.
Well, sort of. The clothes are not free, but they are cheap. Often, they are very, very nice. Name brands abound -- lots of Old Navy and Gap, and also higher-end stuff like Zara and Brooks Brothers and Tommy Hifiger -- and very little wrong with any of it. I bought six button-down shirts for 500 shillings each (about $7), and even that, I suspect, was too much.
We weren't the only ones. This particular second-hand market is extremely popular with expatriates, who were well in attendance on the Saturday we dropped by. The poor are not the only ones doing the shopping.
When you sort through your closets, tossing this or that shirt in the plastic bag that you'll cart off to goodwill, does it cross your mind that your old shirt is being sold, not donated? Or that it may end up on the back of an expatriate? Does it diminish the significance of your charity?
I would love to track down the fine gent who donated his size 15-and-a-half purple Nicole Farhi shirt, which he must have bought at a discount anyway because the breast pocket is sewn onto the wrong side.
I felt guilty about shopping for clothes that clearly were not intended for me, but I managed to assuage my shrieking consceince. First, the stall-owners were happy as hell for the payday; the guy I bought my new shirts from said he sometimes goes a week without making a single sale. Second, I felt this was an act of defiance against the screwy tariff system, whereby some imports are taxed heavily. I think this dates back to the era of President Moi, who imposed 100% duties on things like washing machines and blenders so that people would hire Kenyans, rather than buy machines, to do the job.
