Ever wondered who’s wearing your cast-offs?

Katrina Manson explores Africa’s extraordinary multimillion-pound trade in secondhand clothing, much of it imported from Britain and the United States Christmas might be a time for cheer and charity but, just as emotionally consuming, it’s also a time for clear-outs. As the annual wander through your wardrobe beckons, consider what happens to cast-offs dispatched to your nearest charity shop.

Drop off a wardrobe has-been and it may turn up in the dusty pathways of Benin or the nightclubs of Nairobi. Babies in the world’s poorest countries wear tops emblazoned with ‘Little Miss Posh’; men in ex-war zones strut about in vests carrying urban-chic slogans such as ‘Rebel’; the odd bit of Armani mixes in with bright African prints. It’s all part of an improbably fascinating business, filled with informal traders, canny customers and some seriously uncanny moments.

Here’s one of them. In a party exploit typical of homesick expats, I was invited to a Burns supper in hot and heady Freetown, Sierra Leone. Tracking down a haggis was a big challenge (a downtown goat eventually did the honours), but it clearly wouldn’t do to be without a kilt. An hour later I stopped at the first pile of raggedy clothes splayed over the road. The word ‘tartan’ didn’t cut much mustard with the Krio-speaking market woman, but after a rummage on my knees I found not one kilt but two. I have unidentified donors to thank, who no doubt gave their garments away hoping to clear some wee spot of space, perhaps mindful of expanding waistlines, and pleased to give to charity to boot. I doubt they had me in mind.

Rejects are big business. Worldwide, the market in secondhand clothes rakes in $1 billion a year, ten times more than in 1990. Such is their lure that fake collectors go door to door pretending to gather up bounty for charity. Our cast off cast-offs — 250,000 tonnes of them — rack up £40 million for the UK’s 7,500 charity shops each year.

Some never leave our shores. Whereas once being an ‘Oxfam kid’ was a dreaded playground insult, today the charity has ‘boutiques’ that sell vintage items back to nifty shoppers at keen prices. Some set the bar so high, you’re lucky if they’ll even take your freebies. But whether flogging spangly 1980s fashion faux-pas, or last season’s shapeless jumper, only a third is sold back to UK shoppers. The rest — the rejected rejects of the bunch, including my kilts — is sorted into up to 400 categories, from sexy tops to kids’ wear, and pressed into bales.

Since 90 per cent of the value of any bale tends to come from the 10 per cent deemed most desirable, picking out high-worth gems is crucial, and provides jobs for many a small rag house across Europe — where 250,000 people work in the industry — and the US. The worst of it is shredded or cut up, ending up as carpet underlay, insulation and factory wiping rags. But a great deal is sold on to rag-and-bone men who ship the stuff to needy places. Oxfam alone earns £4.5 million a year from its Wastesaver operation in Huddersfield, which sorts and sells what doesn’t fly off the shelves of its 730 shops.

It means some of the poorest people in the world have to fork out a small fortune for clothes we liked so little that we discarded them. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said my cabbie, aghast to hear that someone somewhere in Africa might end up having to pay for his wife’s bin-linered good deeds.

‘Maximising the income from the sale of donated items — including on-selling textiles which can’t be sold in-store — to responsi ble textile merchants is a legitimate way to raise funds,’ says David Moir, head of policy and public affairs at the UK’s Association of Charity Shops.

Not every African country agrees. A sense of affront, or perhaps it’s dark humour, is allpervasive. In Togo, secondhand clothes are known as ‘dead white man’s clothing’ and in Somalia as ‘who died’. In Sierra Leone, the world’s least developed country, they’re known nonchalantly as ‘junks’.

Some countries have gone so far as to ban them altogether, on a point of pride. While Cameroon is not averse to the odd used T-shirt, it stops short of used pants and bras, stipulating a ban on ‘worn undergarments’, which in many African countries pile up in bralike mounds on the streets. At independence, Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere refused to have his people dress in the white world’s cast-offs. Today, more than 20 years after the country switched its policy, America’s biggest export to Tanzania is thrown-out clothes.

In 2007, $80 million worth of US hand-me-downs arrived in Africa, and the figures are up 57 per cent so far this year.

Although African countries produce the most cotton in the world, few have managed to spin it into a textiles industry. In a protectionist effort to stave off competition from used clothing to support domestic manufacturing, 31 countries even ban the import of secondhand garments. A dozen are in Africa, the world’s largest recipient of used clothes. They vary from huge markets such as Nigeria and South Africa, to smaller ones including Liberia, Eritrea and Botswana. Some simply make the barriers impossibly high — Morocco and Namibia both require import licences, which are never granted.

Black markets thrive. That puts do-gooding charities in a tricky position. Oxfam agitates on behalf of West Africa’s hard-done-by cotton growers, who flounder in the face of US subsidies, Asian volumes and, some governments argue, charity cast-offs that flood the market. A study commissioned by Oxfam even found that ‘secondhand clothing imports are likely to have played a role in undermining industrial textile/clothing production and employment in West Africa’. The South African Textile Federation says these clothes deprive local people of jobs and food.

That seems to be quite wrong, however. Oxfam notes that the industry creates millions of jobs, as importers, sorters, washers, agents and street sellers. An estimated 90 per cent of Ghanaians wear used clothes and the Salvation Army says up to 20 per cent of Ghana’s workers make their money from them, while five million Kenyans depend on cast-off clothes for their living. Oxfam has also started a pilot sorting house in Senegal to spur local jobs.

Plus, ailing textile industries tend to be largely the fault of poor management, dodgy manufacturing and too much regulation. More recently, the abolition of quotas has also seen Chinese clothes flood the market. These ‘bend-down boutiques’ clothe people too: more than 60 per cent of the population of many African countries wear used clothes, making middle-class outfits available for affordable prices.

‘Secondhand clothes give people the chance of buying what is fashionable and trendy at a price that they would never have been able to afford,’ says Adenike Ogunlesi, who runs Ruff ’N’ Tumble, a Nigerian boutique brand of ten years’ standing that sells upmarket children’s clothing in Lagos. She had to battle a ban on imported fabric. ‘What’s killing the garments industry in Nigeria is the government. They keep changing the rules.’ The rag-tag sector does in any case provide plenty of work for traditional tailors. Given that many outsize Western clothes are huge for thinner African figures, tailors stitch dynamic patterns to take up the slack. ‘I change the big sizes so they sell fast,’ says Abdul Karim, 22, who hangs his ‘designer junks’ from a spindly wooden street stall in Bo, Sierra Leone’s second city, criss-crossed with inventive stitching to add an eye-catching twist to the style. Taught how to tailor by his father, he has adapted tradition to modern needs.

‘The vigorous... trade is testament to the entrepreneurial energy and resourcefulness of the African people,’ says Professor Pietra Rivoli in her book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, for which she followed her garment’s escapades from genesis to reject and back to life again, for five years. For her, the trade is worth encouraging. It forms the largest chunk of the continent’s informal economy, and that’s the bit of the economy that actually works.

One new enterprise is even hoping to sell ‘junks’ back to the West. Texan Eric Kimmel has set up a factory in Sierra Leone to employ villagers to add African flair to Western rejects. Naming the label Trashion, he’ll sell embroidered, tie-dyed and bead-enhanced items back to the US and the UK for up to $300 apiece. Prepare for the day you might find yourself spending hundreds of pounds on something that once upon a time you gave away.