Salaula: the world of secondhand clothing and Zambia

Abstract

Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia, By Karen Tranberg Hansen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. 298. $47.00 cloth, $22.50/£14.50 paper. The Chibemba term salaula means select from pile in the manner of rummaging' or for short, 'to pick' (p. 1). Karen Tranberg Hansen's book considers the physical and metaphorical pickings available to consumers of salaula-second-hand clothing-in Zambia. Hansen's study travels from the source of donated clothing in North America and Western Europe through the middleman importers and, finally, to the individual retailers and in Zambia. Despite its global reach, the book's central focus is on Zambia and the effects of the salaula trade on Zambian notions of style and taste, the local and national economy, and the national textile industry. While documenting the passage of used clothing from the to its transformation into acceptable Zambian wear, Hansen boldly engages with the uneasy issues of inequitable international networks of trade and cultural domination. She implores her readers to reconsider the perception of Zambia as an economically marginal, Third World republic that passively tolerates cast-offs from the First World. Instead she suggests that Zambia is nation of creative and economically innovative people who excel at the art of stylistic bricolage as they actively mediate sociocultural desires. While investigation of the used clothing industry marks shift of topic in her work, the analysis of asymmetrical relationships of power is not for Hansen. A professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, her previous work has considered the interplay between colonial employers and African domestic servants,1 and between Africans and the state in colonial Lusaka.2 Salaula employs broader perspective by questioning the presence and absence of power at variety of levels ranging from the global to the local. Hansen writes that this study of clothing begins where other works have left off. She argues that in order to understand the significant processes of transnational shifts in use and value, scholarly investigation into the used clothing trade must consider the local such clothes evoke for their wearers and the sometimes ambiguous roles of such garments in everyday lives (p. 2). Consumption, she suggests, is work: clothes mediate individual desires and socially appropriate conduct. Hansen concurs with Arjun Appadurai that things or objects-in this case clothes-have lives,3 but she adds that it is social life [that] has things. Clothing has both and cultural value. Beyond the mere practicality of covering one's body, worn textiles can signify wealth, status, education, and involvement, without being a faded and worn imitation of the West (p. 5). Hansen divides the book into two parts: the first considers the meanings that are expressed and interpreted through clothing in Zambia, and the second analyzes the production of used clothing in terms of its import and consumption. She begins by explaining the power of clothing to convey upward mobility and cosmopolitan image in colonial Zambia. She then documents the once-thriving Congo connection that persisted from the mid-1920s to the early 1960s, when ambitious fish traders from northern Zambia sold their catches at the Katanga mines in order to purchase used clothing for resale in Zambia. This influx of new clothing that was previously unavailable presented Zambians with wider array of choices and styles. The last chapter of this section discusses the ways that Zambia's first president, Kenneth Kaunda, utilized clothing as means of instilling national unity. The second section of Salaula covers the production of used clothing from its point of origin in the donation bins of wealthy countries to its transformation into Zambian clothing. Hansen sketches how donated clothing in North America and Europe becomes retail commodity in Africa; and in so doing she implicates supposedly nonprofit charity organizations in this worldwide, multibillion-dollara-year trade. …

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