The Curious Human Knee by Han Yu;

Author:Han Yu;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI036000, Science/Life Sciences/Human Anatomy & Physiology, SCI100000, Science/Natural History
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

At the sprawling Xipamanine market in Maputo, Mozambique, where thirty-some-year-old Mario makes a living selling secondhand jeans, no one likes to buy them ripped.110 Mario purchases his jeans in one-hundred-pound bales coming in as container shipments from North America and Europe. The bales are sold “blind”: sealed and unopened. If Mario is lucky, he gets gently used ones that will fetch good prices. If not, he gets them ripped, scuffed, and stained. The dirtiest and most torn ones won’t sell, and Mario will end up losing money if his bales contain too many pairs like that.

Might some of these unwanted pairs be distressed jeans that were deliberately ripped, torn, and stained, I can’t help wondering. And if so, can Mario tell, and will his Mozambican customers appreciate them as fashion? Probably not.

For Western consumers to deliberately distress clothes, using cheap labor from developing countries, and then dispense with the garments at a charity store, the irony would go full circle. Chances are that your unwanted jeans won’t make their way to the local shelter. Instead, they will be sorted, packaged, and sold back to developing countries, for a profit. Globally, about four million metric tons of old clothes are exported annually, which are equivalent to seven-and-a-half billion pairs of jeans and valued at more than $4 billion.111

Many of these clothes find their way to Africa, to places like the Xipamanine market in Mozambique. This country alone imports $55 million of used clothes a year, which is fifty-two thousand metric tons of garments, or the equivalent of ninety-nine million pairs of jeans.112

These secondhand clothes provide impoverished Africans with a cheap source of clothing, at the expense of style and preference. And so it is that in Maputo, it is common for men to wear ladies’ trousers, and in Uganda, a Karamoja elder would attend a tribal ceremony wearing nothing but a woman’s tweed, oatmeal-colored winter overcoat.113

These secondhand clothes provide Mario and thousands of used-clothes traders in Africa a precarious small business to keep their heads above water—but never to escape poverty. The traders face the constant dilemma of risking money on another blind bale or using it to provide for their families, or, indeed, to save money to pay for education toward a better-paying job.114

These secondhand clothes, along with cheap new garments coming in from East Asia, outcompete Africa’s domestically manufactured garments, chocking to death the local industry and the prospect of economic growth, the hope of escaping distressed clothes.115

In fashion as in health, money, race, power, and status all matter. Our knees, curiously enough, provide a glimpse of that reality.

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