Black Material Geographies
Episode 5
Colonialism's Afterlife & Upcyling Fashion, Pt. 1
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
In an article in Essence Magazine from May of 2000, Octavia Butler wrote,
"There's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There's no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers, at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be."
Although the social, political and ecological issues of our time may feel overwhelming, they are not insurmountable. All of the systems that we interact with on a daily basis need to be transformed towards true sustainability. I define sustainability as being able to provide for current and future generations without violence, oppressive hierarchies or environmental devastation. It is consistent and sustained livelihood conditions that center agency and dignity in the systems that undergird our lives.
The good news is that all the systems that undergird our lives need to be transformed, so every industry has an opportunity to do so. Fashion is one of the largest polluting industries on our planet. It creates vast amounts of textile waste which usually end up in countries in tropical Africa and the Caribbean. So, we need a myriad of solutions to tackle this problem. Reusing, also known as up-cycling fashion, is one way designers are addressing the issue of textile waste and fashion pollution in countries outside of the West.
This is Black Material Geographies, a show that explores the stories behind forgotten fibers and the textiles you think you know all too well. I'm your host, Teju Adisa-Farrar, speaking to you from the land of the Lenape people.
Ghana and Haiti are two countries that receive millions of pounds of textile waste from the West. Two million tons of textile items are dropped off at charities every year in the US, but only 10 to 20% of those items end up on the racks of domestic thrift stores. The rest goes to landfills and international secondhand clothing trades ending up in countries like Ghana and Haiti. The US consumes 20 billion garments annually. Americans trash over 11 million tons of textiles per year. They end up in landfills, which are usually near Black, Brown and working class communities. More than half of all the people in the United States who live within 1.8 miles of a hazardous waste facility are people of color.
As textiles in these landfills decompose, they produce greenhouse gas emissions like methane which exacerbates climate change. In the US, only about 15% of clothing is recycled. This pathway of sending old things from the West to countries in Africa and the Caribbean is part of a legacy of Western countries treating other parts of the world like a dumping ground. The fashion industry is now part of this. Jonathan Curry, a Haitian colleague of mine, reflects on this problem.
Jonathan Curry:
Because it's a fast fashion problem I would think that some people would see Haiti as a dumping ground. Maybe they're getting more things faster than they can sell them because it's not like Haitians are just by buying clothes all the time. They have other needs besides just buying clothes. So I think it's definitely a luxury to just be buying clothes all the time like in the US, just consuming. I would say those are mostly the problems that I can see, Haiti as a dumping ground and just not able to develop a textile industry because of that.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Old clothing is not the only thing sent to other parts of the world from the West. Cars are too. On average, 25,000 cars a month are sent to Benin, many coming from Belgium and the Netherlands. From there, 80 to 90% of those cars will be exported to Nigeria illegally because of the high import duties. They are sent to countries in West Africa where they pollute the air and require maintenance and parts that are not always accessible there. Often countries in the West believe they are helping or assisting poor countries by sending old things that could be reused again, but these old things could be reused again in the region that they are currently in. If they're not good enough for us, then why are they good enough for humans in other places? In addition to creating more waste and pollution in other countries, they also reinforce imperialism and dependence on Western consumption.
Jonathan Curry:
The thing is, there isn't a brief or simple way to describe imperialism. It's a complex topic. What I can say is that imperialism is very similar to colonialism but they're not the same thing. Usually colonialism and imperialism are pretty much described as the empires trying to seek more power and land expansion. Usually they both dictate political and economical control of the land and the suppression of the Indigenous people of that land, but I would say that the difference that the scholars or the revolutionaries would make is that colonialism is the process of a country taking physical control of a territory while imperialism is mostly a political and monetary dominance either directly or indirectly. Personally, I would say that imperialism is simply the expansion of capitalism. The new imperialism was fundamentally an economic phenomenon.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Pepe is what secondhand clothing mostly from the US is called in Haiti. Pepe started coming to Haiti in the 1960s when governments and charities started sending donated goods to the country in bulk. Secondhand clothing used to be called Kennedy because it was the Kennedy administration that thought they were assisting Haiti by sending millions of pounds of old clothes. Eventually, the Haitians started calling the clothes pepe instead of Kennedy. As a result of this influx of clothing, mostly fast fashion, the local tailoring and seamstressing industry lost jobs. People weren't wearing and having traditional clothing made that much anymore because pepe is widely available in bulk and is much cheaper. People who used to make and sell fabric are not able to compete with the influx of finished garments even though they are mostly not in good condition.
Jonathan Curry:
Pepe is problematic because obviously it affects the textile industry in Haiti. People are not able to sell the Haitian traditional clothing which looks a lot like African clothing. They tried to abandon pepe, but because it's so popular amongst the population and for the prices and the brands that they buy, it would be very difficult. I think it's super affordable. If you go to a store, the stores in Haiti, a lot of the times they're not really made for the general population. They're made mostly for people that have money, the bourgeois and stuff like that. They want to emulate that, they want to be that, they also want to have good things. Let's say for example you have like a Gucci shirt in pepe for three dollars, if you were to actually buy it at the store it would be 100. Obviously they can't afford that so they would buy it at pepe and then they would be walking in Gucci.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Cultural imperialism is when a dominant country like the US imposes its culture onto a less powerful country like Haiti. This results in people valuing US culture over their own because US culture is connected to power and status. Even just wearing a US brand is a way for a lower class Haitian to try to feel more valuable. We know this is the case for many communities. Often fashion is a way that Black folks who feel devalued in society try to reclaim or express our value. In the case of Haiti, US imperialism has undermined Haitian sovereignty for more than a century.
Jonathan Curry:
I think that the US has always had an eye on Haiti after they gained their independence. I think that, as France moved away from Haiti, the US pretty much had an eye on Haiti to gain control of the region. I would say that they feared, after the independence of Haiti, that their slaves on the south, because Haiti is close to the south of the US, that they would rebuild themselves. When France left, they pretty much were also one of the countries that didn't recognize Haiti's independence and they also supported the embargo on the country. You had countries like Germany that would come into the country and try to influence Haiti as well. They would try to integrate into the Haitian society. Americans saw that as a threat because they became the largest trade partner of Haiti at that time. Haiti was being destabilized by the US, by Germany and France.
Basically, at some point in 1914, American bankers raised a question that Haiti wouldn't pay their loans and they came into their country and they seized Haiti's gold reserve. They pretty much said to Haiti, "You're having a lot of turbulent times in the country so we're here to "reestablish" peace and order." You know that never goes how they say it's going to go.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
According to plan. It's never peace.
Jonathan Curry:
Yeah, exactly. It's never peace. The US used 40% of Haiti's income to pay back their own debt and to pay back French bankers as well. Another thing that they did during the occupation was they had the power to veto any decision that the Haitian government could make. Basically anything that the Haitian government wanted to do had to be approved by the US. Another thing that they would do is they had infrastructure projects so they had forced labor to do these projects. They would build roads, hospitals, bridges, canals, which are still here today, but it pretty much led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Haitians. They also had a lot of resistance during these occupations and they would pretty much kill any resistance.
I think the most prevalent thing that they did, since we're talking about the early 1900s, you had Jim Crow in the US so they introduced those Jim Crow laws. They had concentration camps, they had racial segregation, they demonized the practicing of voodoo which is still present today, people still see voodoo as a bad thing. They changed the constitution of Haiti during the occupation so foreigners are able to buy land. That wasn't the case before. They pretty much came there to be able to secure financial assets in Haiti, to be able to build businesses and corporations and whatnot. They were able to buy land. I would say one of the most important things that they did also, which is still the case today, is that they give a lot of power to Haitian elite which were mostly white people, light-skinned people, they pretty much own everything now.
When it comes to trade relations, I would say that the US very much exploits Haiti a lot. They would use those wealthy bourgeois Haitians, like I said, to build their corporations there. You have people that do, for example, shirts in Haiti, sweatshops, so they would pay them 25 cents a shirt, if that. They're using the labor force of Haiti to create cheap goods and obviously they're over-exploiting them.
A lot of Haitians see that as "job opportunities'' because they don't have any jobs at all. A lot of people would argue, "Oh, at least they're giving them jobs," but the jobs are not in the right conditions at all. They spend their whole day inside the factory, they have a certain demand for how many shirts they have to produce per day.
Another thing that they do is sometimes, for example, you have big corporations like Coca Cola that would come into the country and they would want to plant certain crops there for their beverages. What they would do is they would steal land from Haitian farmers or people that owned land. Sometimes the people don't necessarily have paper to show for their land so sometimes they can seize the land and they don't have anything to back it up and say, "Hey, this is my land. This is my property." It's usually passed from generation to generation so sometimes they don't have the legal status to show that this is their land and they can't fight for that. The relationship is there, but it's definitely a big power dynamic because they definitely use Haitian elite as a middle man to segue their interests.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
While sending secondhand clothing from the US to Haiti seems like charity, it is actually part of a larger economic influence that adds to destabilizing the local Haitian economy and textile industry.
Since January of this year, 2022, Haitian garment and textile workers have been staging massive protests against the low wages and oppressive conditions they work in. The average garment worker in Haiti is paid about four dollars a day to produce apparel that is sold for much more in the US. In addition to stealing from worker's pensions and closing factories without pay, American multinational companies are able to create super profits by paying low wages to Haitians and receiving tax breaks. This is due to unequal trade agreements.
Over 80 million garments are assembled in Haiti, then re-imported into the US tax free. The Haitian garment workers who are in the streets of Port-au-Prince right now are demanding a livable wage and some medical benefits, though American corporations are refusing to negotiate, further reinforcing a history of imperialism in Haiti.
Haiti is not the only country who has to deal with millions of pounds of secondhand clothing coming in. Ghana is another country that struggles with this as well. Chloe Asaam, who is a Ghanaian designer and works for The OR Foundation, gives some context to this issue.
Chloe Asaam:
The clothing ends up from the global north to the secondhand clothing market in Accra, which is called Kantamanto. It is one of the largest second-hand clothing markets in West Africa, if not the world. It sees 15 million pieces coming into Accra every week.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
50 million? Five-zero?
Chloe Asaam:
One-five million.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
15 million, okay.
Chloe Asaam:
Yeah, one-five million.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Which is still a lot.
Chloe Asaam:
It's still a lot coming in every week. These are predominantly fast fashion pieces so the quality of the products are not great. Because it's coming in at a really fast pace, Kantamanto can't really do its job or properly recirculating and up-cycling and recycling the pieces that it gets. From our research, we realized that, of the 15 million, one-five million that comes into Kantamanto every week, 40% ends up as waste dumped in the street or in the waterways or in gutters or left out in the open or being landfilled. The thing is, Ghana at this time does not have the capacity and the infrastructure to be able to recycle the textile waste and people don't know how to deal with it.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
More than seven million garments from the West end up in the waterways, landfills or streets of Ghana every week because they cannot be up-cycled or recycled properly. This textile waste pollutes Ghana's waterways which are already impacted by climate change. In parts of the Northern region of Ghana, they're experiencing droughts and flooding which has become a struggle for the people and the government. People who live along the Volta River are constantly displaced by this. As a result, agricultural production has declined and changes in rainfall patterns and temperature have led to an ecological imbalance that also impacts Ghana's fisheries.
This is not the first time the West has negatively impacted Ghana's fisheries. In the 19th century, the British colonial government in Ghana promoted a freedom of the seas approach to the Gold Coast's fisheries. These liberalization policies ignored Indigenous fishing practices and allowed for the over-exploitation of Ghana's coastal fisheries. Two centuries later, Western influence again is disrupting the Gold Coast's waterways, but this time with something seemingly innocuous, fast fashion.
Chloe Asaam:
Working for The OR Foundation, it's basically how fashion seems really glamorous and aspirational and really exclusive, but no one really talks about how it's one of the most impactful industries in the world in terms of waste and environmental injustices and having a wide impact spectrum so to speak on everything that exists on the planet. We don't really talk about that, we only focus on the face, the status value of the clothing and not understand where it came from or the end cycle, the end of life of that particular piece being produced.
We are stuck in the middle where it's just how it looks and not really ... what goes into it we don't fully understand. If I probably called a kid here and said, "What is this thing?" Or, "What is this brand?" They probably could tell you what kind of brand it is, but they wouldn't understand where that brand is or what goes into making clothing or what goes into actually sewing. People don't really understand who is behind our clothing and how our clothing ends up. I can tell you a lot of people know, "Oh, this is really fine. I look fine in this. I can take this out, I can do that." It's the glamorous part that people talk about. That's not to say that's not good.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Even though fast fashion has such a significant impact on our environment, we really don't know or understand how it works or how our clothes are made. We don't understand that, when we give our clothes away or throw our clothes away, how that ripples across the globe impacting communities of merchants, tailors and designers in places like Ghana and Haiti.
Haiti is one of the poor nations on the planet despite its rich legacy of being one of the most profitable plantation colonies and the first nation in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1793 which was a couple of years into the Haitian revolution. Now 75% of Haitians live on less than two dollars a day, in no small part because of the debt they had to pay back to France for their freedom along with the German and US American imperialism that impacted the country throughout the 20th century.
Jonathan Curry:
Haiti, after their independence, they had to pay France 21 billion dollars. That's what they demanded, because supposedly they had lost property after their independence, as reparations to them. The US came, gave some loans to Haiti to pay France their debt. Germany also did the same thing, but what happened was that they would pay back their debt at a very high interest. Until the late 1800s, Haiti was basically using most of their wealth to pay back debt. Imagine they gained their independence in 1804 and they pretty much had a century of paying debt. That systematically holds back the country. I feel like there's been a struggle against imperialism since their independence.
I would say in terms of France specifically, one of the biggest things is the land and what they've done to the land. Because Haiti was one of the world's biggest producers of coffee and sugar, the land was over-exploited and the people as well. The forests were being cleared to have a system of plantation monoculture and pretty much the land never recovered from that exploitation. Even after France left, the government still use the land, they were still cutting trees to be able to pay back the debt. They were pretty much using most of their income to pay back debt.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
By the time Haiti won independence from France in 1804, most of their land was no longer arable due to the monocultural practices of cultivating cotton, sugar cane and coffee under French colonization. Currently only 38.8% of Haitian's land is suitable to grow food. As Haiti continually struggles to have a stable economy, pepe has become big business. Sellers want to meet customer's demands and want to have the brands that everyone wants at cheap prices. What's ironic and problematic is that the garments will be made in sweatshops in Haiti, sent to the US for retail and then sent back to Haiti as pepe.
While there needs to be many solutions to dealing with secondhand clothing being sent to Haiti and Ghana, one way people in Ghana deal with this issue is by up-cycling the clothing. Ghana's culture is deeply connected to its traditional textiles and heritage of hand making clothing.
Chloe Asaam:
It's how we interact with our clothing. If you've ever witnessed customary events or rights of passage, everyone there is wearing something beautiful, something that is hand-woven, something that has been hand printed, something that speaks to Ghanaian craftsmanship. It's just so beautiful and it evokes these feelings of pride and identity and a sense of community that I would not replace with anything. That in itself is our connection to the people that came before us, their way of life. That is heritage to me. Our clothing is how we communicated our values, the symbols, the folklore, stories that grandparents shared, all of that is woven, literally in terms of threads, weft, actually hand weaving and also being imprinted on those woven natural fabrics.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Chloe grew up around women making clothes and understood the craftsmanship and scale involved in this act of dressing ourselves, but her journey to becoming a fashion designer was not straightforward. Most of our journeys are not. Chloe found her way back to clothing and textiles after some detours.
Chloe Asaam:
I got into it, my first year I was like, "Oh, I could do this for a living." I really loved the person it's shaping me to be. I think through fashion and being in a community of creatives, I was able to find my voice, I was able to be a bit more expressive with my clothing. I was able to connect to who I truly am and the values that I really hold dear. It wasn't a straightforward route to design, I was just finding my own vibe and then it worked out eventually. That's just how we have been trained as designers to use what is in our proximity, to use what is already there, not to go and buy new.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Here that would be considered a sustainable designer. What does that mean to you, that title that a lot of people in the West are now using to talk about these sorts of practices of using dead stock, recycling fabrics? What does it mean to you to be considered a sustainable designer?
Chloe Asaam:
Well, that word, I feel like every day I find it really hard to define because there are various benchmarks to look at when you're defining that. It's becoming really harder and harder because a lot of people are coming in. Brands I know not to be sustainable are claiming they have a sustainable line or a circular line so it's making it really hard for us to really define what it is because these words are being thrown everywhere.
In essence, I feel like a sustainable designer will look at three things. Size or scale, what are you producing, who are you producing for and how? Where the challenge is and how we get it wrong is when we're producing in excess. Why not work the other way around like we inherently did? At least what my grandma was telling me or what her grandma was telling her is you go to a tailor, you get fitted, you make your clothing, you use it and re-purpose that garment into something else. You don't buy off of the rack. That wasn't something that was inherently ours in terms of even how we produce our ceremonial pieces. It's something that is with you your whole lifetime. For me, it would look at scale and size and the market and how much you're producing. A sustainable designer would look at their process and try to tailor it in a way that doesn't affect the environment and doesn't affect the people that she works with.
Third will be the life cycle of a product. How did I get to make this product? Where did I get the material to make this product? Also, if the consumer buys this product, where does it end up? For me, that is the benchmark I use when I'm producing. I don't make clothing if you have not ordered it. I don't make them and go and put them in a shop. It's on a pre-order basis, myself and the people I work with, we take your measurements and get it tailored to you and then in three weeks you have your product. I don't believe in making pieces that no one wants. I believe that, since colonialism I have to say, we've lost that close contact with our tailors, seamstresses and designers coming in and really sitting with a person and really talking to them and getting that piece tailored to you.
As a designer, how you went into the industry, you started small, at least from my perspective here you start small and you have a small consumer base, but then it gets so big everyone else comes into the equation, you can't control it and that's how things go south. That's how people end up being exploited and that's how people end up being abused. That's how people form that disconnection with clothing because there's no human connection to it. It just becomes a monster, something that's just moving because it has to move.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Chloe says once it gets too big it becomes a monster. In many ways, the mainstream fashion industry right now is a monster. Even the inception of this global industry is rooted in violence and disconnection.
It sounds like part of what colonialism's impact was is that it took out the social relations of clothes making by centralizing and industrializing this process, creating these large manufacturing factories. You don't know who's making your clothes, you don't know how they're made, you don't know what they're made of. All of those social relationships that you have to have, like you had growing up and wearing clothes and your family making clothes, a lot of people don't have any of that experience. It's important to you to bring that back in. What are some of these traditional practices or things you grew up with in terms of making clothing that you want to try to reclaim and keep and bring back?
Chloe Asaam:
Yeah. First of all it's that interaction, face-to-face interaction with the people who make the clothes. Inquire about them, talk to them, find out what it takes to actually stitch because it's not magic. Work goes into making a garment and people don't talk about it enough. If designers are listening on here, they know that it takes a lot of work and a lot of love to be able to create one product so I want people to start talking about it. I want to bring that back.
I really hope young people here who are starting to divert from that way can find a way back because fast fashion has become this monster that young people here feel like ASOS or other fast fashion brands are more valuable than local designers. They attach so much value to that, sometimes I don't get it, but again, we got here through that disconnect of not getting to know who makes their clothes, getting to know what goes into clothes and the social relationships that form around clothing has been taken away. I want to bring that back because a lot of people, young people I speak with, they've lost sight of that practice or that value we attach to clothing.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
Cultural imperialism encourages people to find value in brands from the West even if they are not good quality and are produced in problematic ways. Local artists and designers, regional specificity and geographic nuance are overshadowed by a handful of global brands, mostly American and European, that make clothes that travel thousands of miles before ending up in a landfill or in Ghana and Haiti. There is hope always. Designers like Chloe and The OR Foundation give us hope. Even for a country like Haiti that is often spoken about as being hopeless, we have to remain critically optimistic.
Jonathan Curry:
Honestly, I have a lot of hopes for Haiti. Even though a lot of people would disagree that Haiti has a future, I still believe in my little island. I would hope that people that are Haitian distant like me can read about Haiti's history and its relation to imperialism and capitalism and colonialism because I think that's how people really would understand why this situation is like it is today. The country isn't just poor because that's life or because people like to say that we're cursed. That's not the case at all. There's a specific reason why the country is like that.
Other people, my mom would not like me to say this, but I would like that one day the working class overthrows the bourgeoisie of Haiti. I would hope that Haiti is finally free from the grips of imperialism. For an intervention I think they definitely need reparation, they deserve reparation. I also would hope that people take a look at the history of Haiti, people from America, Black people from America, to understand the history of Haiti and the impact that the little island has had on this side of the globe by just freeing themselves. We caused a chain reaction by just doing that.
Teju Adisa-Farrar:
When we give or throw things away, sometimes the away is other countries. The away is Ghana and Haiti. Imperialism is so embedded into American culture that we often don't know that we are participating in it. Having awareness of this helps us to make better choices, helps us to support designers like Chloe. In the next episode, we'll hear from other designers who are using materials that would otherwise be thrown away.
Collective freedom means that no countries are treated like a dumping ground. Collective freedom means we honor Haiti as the first place in the world to abolish slavery. We can decide that creating the materials that make up our lives should not be done through forced labor and violence. Collective freedom is being in a relationship with those who make our clothes. It is understanding that our clothes express and reflect our values even when we're not trying to make a political statement. As we support all of the solutions to the fiber and fashion crisis such as up-cycling old clothes and fabrics, we can simultaneously critique imperialism and uplift textile practices that have existed for centuries.
It's time for the wind down. I invite you to take a deep breath and stretch your body. Release tension in your shoulders, jaw and neck, taking a moment to reflect on the clothes that we consume, taking a moment to reflect on the clothes we give or throw away. Today we learned that away may be harming the environment of other people. We learned about imperialist history in the great nation of Haiti, we heard about Western clothes crowding the markets of Ghana. We talked through so many things, so let's just sit in that feeling for a bit. I invite you to take a deep breath and thank yourself for listening to something new today.
I invite you to take a deep breath and imagine a life where nothing is thrown away, a life where clothes and fabrics are reused again and again until they can return to the Earth, a life where Ghanaian girls do not have curved spines from carrying our charity on their backs. Imagine you know where your clothes were made and who made them. Thank you for spending time in Haiti and Ghana with me. Thank you for caring about the environment of all humans. Thank you for listening, learning and experiencing the material geographies that we are all made of.
You can subscribe to Black Material Geographies anywhere you get your podcasts. Black Material Geographies is part of the Whetstone Radio Collective. This podcast is a team effort. Thank you to the Black Material Geographies team, my producer Tiffani Rozier, audio editor Ray Royal, composer Philip Kelechi Nnamdi Iroh, researcher Haven Ogbaselase and intern Kai Stone.
I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective head of podcast Céline Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, associate producer Quentin Lebeau, production assistant Amalissa Uytingco and sound intern Simon Lavender. Thank you to Whetstone art director Alex Bowman for the cover art.
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