Second-hand clothing encounters in Zambia: global discourses, Western commodities, and local histories

The rapid expansion in commercial exports of second-hand clothing from the West to the Third World and the increase in second-hand clothing consumption in many African countries raise challenging questions about the effects of globalisation and the meanings of the West and the local that consumers attribute to objects at different points of their journey across global space. This article draws on extensive research into the sourcing of second-hand clothing in the West, and its wholesaling, retailing, distribution and consumption in Zambia. Discussing how people in Zambia are deahng with the West's unwanted clothing, the article argues that a cultural economy is at work in local appropriations of this particular commodity that is opening space for local agency in clothing consumption. Clothing has a powerful hold on people's imagination because the self and society articulate through the dressed body. To provide background for this argument, the article briefly sketches recent trends in the global second-hand clothing trade that place the countries of sub-Saharan Africa as the world's largest importing region. There follows a discussion of Zambians' preoccupation with clothing, both new and second-hand, historically and at the present time. It demonstrates that the meanings consumers in Zambia attribute to second-hand clothing are neither uniform nor static but shift across class and gender lines, and between urban and rural areas. Above all, they depend on the cultural politics of their time. In dealing with clothing, people in Zambia are making sense of post-colonial society and their own place within it and in the world at large.