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Toi Market: where your clothing gets a second chance

Experience the colourful chaos of Nairobi's Toi Market: from unique findings to the impact of second-hand clothing on East-Africa.

Charlie's Travels | Blog | Toi Market: where your clothing gets a second chance

Vintage paradise

Are you good at browsing among mountains of clothes? At Toi Market you can find a variety of gems, from Primark to real silk  rejects. Actually, it might remind you of a fancy warehouse, but things are a bit different here: here, the streets are a bit dustier and at the end of the day, you can reward yourself not on a pretzel, but on a delicious stalk of sugar cane. A local delicacy from which you munch the sugar water, only to spit out the chewed-out fibres.

Toi Market

After a pleasant ride in a crowded Matatu, Nairobi's most common means of transport, we stop at a petrol station. As we get out, somewhat sweaty, vendors come walking towards us from different corners. ‘What are you looking for miss, can I help you miss.’ We walk on quietly, impressed by the quantities of clothes and shoes that approach us. It is a colourful scene and each stall sells its own wares. In the corner of my eye, a beautiful girl with an arrogant head slips into a green suede dress, while the vendor holds up a cracked mirror in front of her. We stop at a table full of shiny Nikes. Shoes that would still sell for top dollar in the Netherlands, but cross the counter here for no more than 12 euros. Are they fake, fallen off the wagon or are they the same pattas you get at Footlocker in the Netherlands? It does not become entirely clear. William sits on a wooden stool diligently scrubbing one of his new acquisitions. ‘I just came back from Gikomba, here all the clothes come in in big bales and I buy shoes by the kilo,’ he says. He was lucky, says William. ‘There were a lot of good trainers among them this time!’  

What happens to our discards

All the clothes sold at Toi Market come from the West. Yes, after you feel good about throwing your old clothes in the garment bin and then, being the good samaritan that you are, treat yourself to a beer, your discards travel to East Africa, among other places, where the clothes are sold commercially at the market. But governments in East Africa are no longer waiting for our discards: recently, the Ugandan government announced that it wants to curb the sale of super-cheap second-hand clothes (despite the fact that many Ugandans are actually happy with the good-quality clothes flowing into their country!). In Kenya, and therefore in the rest of East Africa, this way we ensure that there is no room for the growth of their own garment industry. No clothing brand/factory can compete with the dumping prices your old clothes are sold for in these various second-hand markets. So this is where my own dilemma starts. In the Netherlands, we work so hard to keep our ecological footprint as small as possible, see our bodies as temples and do our best to consume as little as possible. But why does our responsibility stop as soon as our old discards fall into the clothes bin? Why have I myself never thought about what happens next? Statistics show that in 2015, $151 million (!) worth of used clothes were imported into the East Africa region alone. So why stop importing something that is in demand? 27-year-old Joanna spins another round in front of the mirror on a pair of canary yellow stilettos. ‘There is not enough supply here yet, if you want to look different from other girls, Toi Market is the only place where you can buy clothes.’  

A ban on second-hand clothes

OK, no easy task: I'm going to link a fun, colourful visit to the second-hand market to the political stance of East African countries that have had enough of that trade. But how understandable is it that they are tired of us continuing to dump our welfare goods with them, thus denying them the chance to build a garment industry of their own? When our discards are banned from the East African market, second-hand clothes will slowly disappear from the market. Result: More demand for new clothes. Another problem that comes into play here is that Asia will try to fill this gap. So it is imperative that the East African textile industry starts expanding. But to get ahead of China, the garment sector needs more support and assistance. There is still a lot of work to be done! Think better infrastructure and power supply. It is rather ironic that resold, reused clothing ends up being unsustainable! It will take a long haul to both curb the sale of second-hand clothes and grow Kenya's textile industry. For now, at least, for the many Nairobians who shop at Toi Market, it is still very important that your second-hand clothes find their way to Nairobi's Toi Market!  

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