Author: Gerda Kuiper

While I was in Tanzania earlier this year, people regularly asked me: “Why do you carry out your research on second-hand clothes in Lindi and Mtwara? The centre of the mitumba trade is Dar es Salaam!” As Tanzania’s economic centre and location of the port where the second-hand clothes enter the country, Dar es Salaam would indeed be a feasible research location. However, due to my focus on the translocal rather than the global scale, introduced in a previous post, I decided to look beyond the port of arrival.

The mitumba trade reaches every remote corner of Tanzania and it connects large cities with secondary towns and their rural hinterland. I chose to focus on the secondary towns of Lindi and Mtwara on Tanzania’s southern coast specifically because I was already familiar with the region. Moreover, many of the mitumba traders in Dar es Salaam originate from there. In fact, the common word for “petty trader” in Swahili – machinga – is also the name of one of the ethnic groups residing on the southern coast. Finally, a lively mitumba trade also exists in the region itself, as can be observed at daily auctions in Lindi and Mtwara town.

Nevertheless, I understand the surprise about my choice of study location. Lindi and Mtwara have for long been known as sleepy, disconnected towns with little economic activity. Sources I found in the National Archives (TNA) in the UK indicate that the region was already known as an underdeveloped periphery when it was under British colonial rule. The name of Lindi Province was changed to Southern Province in the early 1930s. The official reason for this name change was to make the name more “descriptive”, as the Annual Report for Tanganyika of 1934 stated, but the actual aim was to shed off the negative connotations attached to the name Lindi. The recently appointed Provincial Commissioner motivated the request for change by stating that “the Province suffers from its name”. He also explained that he himself was suffering from the “Lindi complex” upon arrival in Lindi. “It is difficult to diagnose the complaint but it no doubt arises from the very trying climate and living conditions and a belief that the Province is a back-water.”[1]

Notably, the region has not always been a periphery. The coast was incorporated in global trade networks in pre-colonial times, through the slave and ivory trade across the Indian Ocean, which also brought foreign textiles to the region. The ports of Lindi and Kilwa were already prominent in such networks before the city of Dar es Salaam even had come into existence. People have for centuries moved in and out of the region in search of work, trade, land or security, for instance from across the Ruvuma River south of Mtwara which constitutes the border between present-day Tanzania and Mozambique. Nevertheless, the region somehow became known as a disconnected and underdeveloped area in the British colonial period. Scholarly literature on the area commonly argues that the image of being a “back-water” somehow became a self-fulling prophecy and made it into a periphery (see Seppälä and Koda, 1998). The lack of infrastructure and the miserable state of the roads in the region has been lamented upon by government officials for the better part of the twentieth century. It hindered trade and the export of agricultural produce. As argued by Streit (2018: 529), the general lack of infrastructure confirmed the peripheral image of the region, therewith justifying a lack of investments there.

Colonial reports in the 1950s already mentioned plans for improvement of the road connecting Lindi and Mtwara to Dar es Salaam.[2] Yet, it took some sixty years before this road was finished. Until then, the travel from Lindi to Dar es Salaam, a distance of some 500 kilometres, could take several days and was simply impossible during the rainy season. This road has for long symbolized the region’s disconnected status. The lack of opportunities induced young men (and sometimes women) to look for a job or trade elsewhere in Tanzania. These young people found a place to stay and work in larger cities through people they knew from “home”. The lack of good infrastructure therefore paradoxically included the region in translocal networks of labour migration.

While many young people left the region in the 1980s and 1990s, others started trading second-hand clothes on informal auctions in the towns. The road to Dar es Salaam was finally finished in the early 2010s. The travel to Mtwara takes some eight hours by bus now, making it easier for labour migrants living in Dar es Salaam to visit their family members who stayed in the south. The better connection has also impacted the way mitumba traders in the region itself can access goods. Some have simply continued to order stock through brokers in Dar es Salaam, which is then brought to them by bus or lorry. However, several traders in Mtwara told me they travel to Dar frequently, say once or twice a month, so that they can select their bales of clothing themselves. The mitumba trade is sometimes characterized as a “gamble”: the quality and appropriateness for local markets varies considerably between the bales of clothing. Some yield high profit while others render great losses. Being able to travel to the city and to select ones stock oneself can therefore make all the difference. Together with the emergence of mobile phones and mobile money, the finishing of the road to Dar es Salaam has therefore provided the local mitumba traders with a variety of options to organize their trade.

Bibliography

Seppälä, Pekka, and Bertha Koda, eds. 1998. The Making of a Periphery: Economic Development and Cultural Encounters in Southern Tanzania. Seminar Proceedings 32. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.

Streit, Katie Valliere. 2019. ‘South Asian Entrepreneurs in the Automotive Age: Negotiating a Place of Belonging in Colonial and Post-Colonial Tanzania’. Journal of Eastern African Studies 13 (3): 525–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2019.1628163

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[1] TNA, FCO/141/17729: Provincial Commissioner Lindi Province Kitching, Lindi, to the Acting Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam, 3 January 1934.

[2] TNA, CO 822/975/12: Minutes of the conference to consider certain aspects of development in the Southern Province, Mtwara, 23 and 24 September 1955.

This is a blog post I had not anticipated writing when I left for fieldwork in January 2020. Even though the coronavirus was already spreading quickly in and beyond China at the time, the world was not yet preparing for a pandemic. I also did not reckon with the possibility it would affect my fieldwork. The virus was furthermore relatively late in reaching Tanzania, with the first case reported on March 16 only. Until now there are only 299 confirmed cases. Nor has Tanzania as yet imposed a lockdown. Even though some measures have been taken, such as the closing of schools and the cancellation of events, the government has been reluctant to take measures that heavily impact the economy. Nevertheless, this global crisis has already had severe local repercussions in Tanzania’s southern regions. It has affected my fieldwork massively, as perhaps also noticeable from the recent lack of blog posts.

Only a few weeks into my fieldwork, the first cases of Covid-19 were reported and I as of end of March decided not to travel far anymore within Tanzania. This implied I could not follow itinerant traders, as I had hoped to do. I could also not travel to Dar es Salaam, one of my main research sites. Such a trip would also have made little sense at this stage: the libraries and archives I planned to visit were now closed for visitors. Moreover, I would not have risked going to the extremely crowded second-hand clothing market where I had planned to conduct interviews and observations.

From beginning of April, I contemplated leaving Tanzania, which became increasingly difficult. I have recently indeed cut my fieldwork short. It feels unsatisfactory but at least I have gathered some data and I can for now continue with writing. Moreover, my income is not immediately affected. This is different for the second-hand clothes traders, who, as other participants in Tanzania’s large informal economy, see their daily income decrease or disappear completely.

The exact impact of the coronavirus on the second-hand clothing trade in Tanzania is still largely unclear but the first signs are not good. Already at the end of March, traders in Mtwara told me business was unusually low. They usually sell quite a lot of their clothes to college students, but these students left the town when the schools and colleges closed.

Before I left Tanzania last week, I talked to a middleman who already trades in mitumba in Dar es Salaam for almost twenty years now. He told me he had never seen the city like that: “there are no people in town”. His business is extremely low. He and his fellow traders usually purchase bales of clothing, which have already been packed overseas. They then open them up at the market and sell individual pieces of clothing to the highest bidder. There are two main groups of customers at their auction: hawkers who sell clothes on the streets in Posta, the central area of Dar es Salaam where many offices and banks are located; and small-scale traders who bring the clothes to other towns and rural areas. The first group, the hawkers, currently cannot trade, as most office workers stay at home. The second group of traders pays considerably less, sometimes as little as a third of what the others pay, as their customers in the rural areas have much less to spend. The middlemen’s business therefore does not pay now and most bales yield losses rather than profits. Moreover, the quality of the bales of clothing is deteriorating. Little to no shipments come in from for instance China, so the middlemen can now only purchase left-over bales that they previously refused to buy.

Kivuku (the rainy season), always an economically difficult period, is about to end, making way for the harvesting period. This would usually be the time that business would start to thrive again, with increasing purchasing power among consumers especially in the rural areas. This year Tanzanians have to brace themselves for an even more challenging time. The well-established trader I talked to in Dar es Salaam said he is lucky to have a financial buffer and to be able to take some losses. But for many of his fellow businessmen, and especially for the small-scale traders, this period could mean the end of their business, as they will slowly have to “eat” their capital due to the lack of a daily income.

The first few weeks of fieldwork in Tanzania have mainly been about settling in and taking care of practical matters. However, I already had a chance to talk to several mitumba traders who are part of my existing network here, and I passed by a few mitumba markets in Dar es Salaam, Lindi and Mtwara. I for instance learned that middlemen can in a split second recognize the country of origin of a bale of second-hand clothing – and therewith identify its relative value on the local market – by looking at the type of gunny sack used to pack the clothing. I also learned that hawkers and itinerant traders buy their stock from those middlemen on an auction taking place in the early mornings. Moreover, I noticed at the auction place in Mtwara Town that the business provides opportunities for additional informal income-earning activities. The tables used for the auction were surrounded by women selling drinks and food. There were also several banda (sheds) close to the auction place where for instance tailors were sitting who could alter or repair pieces of clothing. The picture below shows this auction place around mid-day, when business is almost over. I plan to visit these auction places at their peak hours in the mornings in the weeks to come.

Perhaps unexpectedly, I did not start my research by visiting Tanzania. In August 2019, I went to the United Kingdom first.[1] As Tanzania used to be a British colony, many of the records from colonial times can be found in London and surroundings. With this visit, I aimed to find out more about the history of the region which my research focuses on, which was called “Lindi Province” and later on “Southern Province” in colonial times. I will discuss this region in a different post. Here, I elaborate on the second aim of my visit to the UK: learning more about the trade in second-hand clothes, specifically to and in East Africa. I visited several archives which keep papers of British charitable organizations that were involved in the donation of and trade in second-hand clothing since WWII.

The archives in the UK usually have digitized archival catalogues, which makes it relatively easy to search their collection. Nevertheless, my research sometimes felt like looking for a nail in a hay stack. I found that the information on the second-hand clothing trade is very fragmented. Eventually, by piecing together data that I found in several archives, I was able to find evidence of a long history of second-hand clothing imports into East Africa.

I first of all visited the UK National Archives, where I found quite some information on Lindi and Mtwara. But the records of the Colonial Office held here also contain an early reference to the SHC-trade in East Africa. Already in 1930, there was a discussion among colonial officials about the desirability of prohibiting the importation of SHC for reasons of hygiene. The government of the Tanganyika Territory (the name of mainland Tanzania at the time) was not in favour of such a prohibition as the trade was simply too profitable.[2]

I found further evidence of the trade in second-clothing in the Annual Reports of the Tanganyika Territory, most of which can be accessed in the library of SOAS at the University of London. The Annual Report of 1947 for instance mentioned second-hand clothing and apparel for sale as a separate category for import duties. The duties levied amounted to thirty percent of the goods’ value, more than the twenty percent for new pieces of clothing.

At the SOAS library, I could furthermore access digital copies of the Tanganyikan Gazette, which published government announcements. A Gazette Notice with a list of uncleared goods at the Customs Warehouse at the port of Dar es Salaam contained for instance one case of second-hand clothes which carried the description: “lovegifts for distribution among needy Africans”.[3] This shows that second-hand clothes by the 1960s were not only traded in East Africa but were also donated from western countries. Whereas this case of clothing seems to be an individual donation, many of these donations were coordinated by emergency relief organizations that had gained experience with distributing food, clothes and other goods among refugees in post-WWII Europe and that later expanded their activities to other regions of the world. I found proof for the distribution of second-hand clothing as a form of aid also specifically for the region of Tanzania that I focus on. The archives of the aid organization Oxfam are kept in the Special Collections of the Weston Library, part of the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. These archives contain several documents on refugees from Mozambique in Lindi and Mtwara regions in the 1980s. One of these documents described explicitly that these refugees were given second-hand clothes (in exchange for labour).[4] These files from different archives together thus document the long presence of used clothing in Tanzania, both as a valuable good for trade and as a form of aid.

Despite the painstaking work of going through records, I enjoy archival research very much, as one can come across small but crucial bits of information in the most unexpected places. I similarly enjoy the work afterwards: going through the data and finding out how it can contribute to my knowledge on the SHC-trade. The analysis of the data I found in the UK is still in its early stages. Indeed, I still have some more archival research ahead of me, this time in Tanzania. These visits will surely provide food for another blog post.

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[1] This visit was made possible by a travel grant from the Global South Studies Centre, the research centre at which I am based.

[2] The National Archives of the UK, CO 533/404/9: “Second-hand clothing: Importation prohibited.”

[3] Tanganyika Gazette, Notice No. 1774, August 2, 1963.

[4] Oxfam Archive, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Oxfam PRF TAN 297: “Lindi Regional Development Director, Lindi, Tanzania: Survey of displaced and indigenous people to identify their support requirements, 1987-1989.”

The omnipresence of the second-hand clothes (SHC) trade that I discussed in the previous blog post is confirmed in estimates of consumption of clothing in Tanzania. A recent report by the Overseas Development Institute estimated that out of 720 million pieces of clothing consumed in Tanzania annually, 540 million pieces are second-hand. These clothes are imported from countries such as the USA, Germany and Australia but – perhaps more unexpectedly – also from China, India and the United Arab Emirates. The Tanzanian traders and consumers are also aware of these diverse origins. I for instance once was given a bill of 10.000 South Korean Won that a trader on Ilala Market had found in the pocket of a second-hand trousers. The local banks would not exchange this currency and I was told to exchange it for euros back home.

The so-called “global value chain” of the second-hand clothes arriving in African countries has received quite some attention. A number of social science studies on the topic have appeared since the early 2000s. Such studies aim to describe all parties involved in the trade and analyse power relations between actors in different locations, such as sorting companies in exporting countries and small-scale traders and consumers in importing countries. These studies show that on a global level, it are mainly the exporting companies that set the conditions for the trade and that make the larger profits.

On a symbolic level, the SHC-trade is often perceived as symptomatic for the dependency relations between the exporting and importing countries. More specifically, the involvement of charities is increasingly criticized. Europe- and US-based charities initially donated clothes as emergency relief, but this distribution since the 1970s and 1980s developed into a commercial trade that provides a substantial source of income to these charities. Critics state that these practices perpetuate existing dependency relations, as developing countries rely on imported second-hand clothes instead of on domestically-produced new clothing.

However, global interdependencies are not that clear-cut. For one, as discussed above, some countries in the Global South have also started to export second-hand clothes. Moreover, some countries that import second-hand clothes, such as India and Kenya, are simultaneously manufacturing new clothes for export.

The most well-known anthropological study on the SHC-trade is the book Salaula by Karin Tranberg Hansen (2000) on Zambia. She showed that the decline of national textile manufacturing industries was complex and not caused by an increase in imports in SHC alone. Moreover, she described the long history of the SHC-trade, which started long before the manufacturing industries were in decline – or had even been established, for that matter. Hansen describes its origins as a trade internal to Europe that transformed into an export trade in the nineteenth century after new clothes had become cheaper. When I visited the UK National Archives, I found documents that confirm this long history, such as a report on the second-hand clothing trade in the UK in the 1920s, which describes exports to South Africa and India.

The global value chain of the second-hand clothes sold in African countries is an interesting topic but has already been well-researched. I therefore aim to look at more local trading and consumption practices instead. I plan to follow the clothes from the port of arrival in Dar es Salaam to rural towns and villages in southern Tanzania. In short, my research focuses less on the global dimensions of the trade and looks at translocal connections instead. I will introduce the specific region that I focus on in a future post.

Bibliography

Calabrese, Linda, Neil Balchin, and Maximiliano Mendez-Parra. 2017. “The Phase-out of Second-Hand Clothing Imports: What Impact for Tanzania?” MPRA 82175. Munich: Overseas Development Institute.

Hansen, Karen. 2000. Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.