Geodog

What happens to that T-shirt you give to charity?

One of my memories from living in Africa is of all the wildly inappropriate T-shirts people wear. One image that is indelibly stamped on my brain is the sight of a Moslem man praying by the side of the road, wearing a Jack Daniels T-shirt. I also remember seeing the giant bales of second-hand clothes being taken apart at the central market in Niamey.

Today, via Joshua Schachter's Memepool I found out that somebody has made a film about the whole phenomenon, called T-Shirt Travels. It looks really good. From the PBS website:

How, Bloemen wondered, did all of these Africans end up selling used clothing?" And where did all the T-shirts, jackets, hats and skirts come from? She decided to follow the trail of the secondhand clothes.

In T-SHIRT TRAVELS, Bloemen first travels to the Jersey shore, where she interviews Americans who donate their goods to various charities but have little idea that their former wardrobes end up in Africa. She talks to export agent Barney Lehrer from Brooklyn, who tells her that the Salvation Army doesn't even unpack most of the donated clothing but sells it to companies for export to third-world countries.

Strapped and packed in bales like hay, the companies who export the goods sell them to commercial dealers in Africa, who mark up the bales of clothing a whopping three to four hundred percent. These dealers in turn sell to Africans like Luka Mafo, a 19-year-old Zambian who sells secondhand clothing to support his mother, brothers, sisters and cousins, hoping he can help them to stay in school and graduate.

But Bloemen still wondered: Was it always this way? What happened to all of the Zambian clothing manufacturers? Mark O'Donnell, spokesperson for Zambian Manufacturers, explains that in 1991, when the country's markets were opened to free trade, container load after container load of used clothing began to arrive in Zambia, undercutting the cost of the domestic manufacturers and putting them out of business. The skills, the infrastructure and the capital of an entire industry are now virtually extinct, with not a single clothing manufacturer left in the country today.

I missed seeing it earlier this week when it was broadcast on my local PBS station, but ITVS has a program search service that allows you to search for upcoming broadcasts, so I'll try there. Or I can always try to find it on video -- for some reason I suspect that it isn't at Blockbuster.