Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (review)

No one who has spent time in Africa can have failed to notice the intensive use of secondhand clothing, extending everywhere across the continent. In this book, Karen Tranberg Hansen provides a delightful, well-researched, and personalized picture of the web of political economy and cultural networks through which any article of clothing discarded in Europe or the United States may become a product transformed in value in an entirely different context. Combining scholarship with the ability to deliver an absorbing narrative of the complex transactions leading from charities to wholesalers through middlemen and retailers and finally to "the work of consumption" (p. 184), Hansen weaves an unusually interesting story of big business and ordinary people.

Salaula is a Bemba word meaning "to pick, rummage, sort through a pile." Its literal use in the clothing markets of Zambia combines Western notions of rummage sales with the idea of finding an unsuspected treasure among the rubbish. It hints at the spirit of entrepreneurial innovation that drives the operations of cultural digestion and experimentation that are detailed in this book. Hansen avoids the easy route of denigrating the Western influence on local fashion, and focuses on the local meaning of the garments as consumers choose and discriminate, exercising their own "judgment, preference, and style" (p. 2). Her focus on small-scale cultural adaptation does not preclude a similarly thorough exploration and clear explanation of the macro perspective, both conceptual and empirical, as it relates to local and global actors and markets.

The story starts and ends with a booming consumer market in salaula clothing in Zambia, growing in the 1980s and expanding through the 1990s. The cultural meaning and significance of clothing styles and choices are at the heart of Hansen's investigation, although she does include chapters explaining the murky world of international trade in these bundles of fabric. (What most Westerners consider charity donations in fact fuel a network of commerce that is rather lucrative for some political-economy actors along the way.) The shifting significance of salaula in Zambia allows insight into the social construction of individuals' needs and wants: "For not only does salaula give people what they need, namely clothing they can afford; it also gives them what they want, namely the ability to dress rather than wear rags" (p. 15). Hansen's exploration, especially of clothing wants and choices, provides a counterpoint to the frequently negative depiction of globalization, considering more fully the clear impact of local agency on Zambian engagement in these markets. The chapters on shopping ("The Work of Consumption") and dressing ("Clothing, Gender, and Power") are particularly strong examples of the value of this approach.

As broad as the book is in scope, covering the historical and contemporary roles of secondhand clothing, internationally and in Zambia, as commodity and symbol, for different ages and sexes, it is understandable that some discussion occasionally seems to ramble. Any reader will likely find some intriguing areas insufficiently well developed or analyzed. For instance, elements of the Zambian case predisposed the population to "preoccupation" with clothes in colonial times, as a mining political economy with a relatively greater focus on population control than would be found in other types of colonies: barred from spending their money on land, houses, or European leisure activities, Zambians could purchase only a very few consumables, and clothing was among them. Since much of the discussion is generalized to Africa and Africans, comparison with the meaning and significance of secondhand clothing in other countries with different social, political, and economic systems (both colonial and contemporary) would be an example of an analytical approach that would carry this work forward to greater interest and consequence.