Vintage Sale!

This week there was a sale. But I resisted buying second-hand skirts for 200 francs. This was easy enough because everyone’s pushiness blocked out the appeal from the salesman who was yelling out the prices at the top of his voice in a very un-reserved un-Rwandan manner. I was back in Israel, almost. Pictured to the left is most definitely not the sale, but full-priced second hand clothing that looks so much prettier, with all the pants, including the sweats, carefully ironed. Note the row of cloth for locally made tailored clothes in the middle.

In Kigali, in the middle of a very impoverished area with chickens flocking around, children with torn clothes, and mud houses, I once saw a man carefully ironing his dress trousers with a thick metal hand iron, perhaps made around the same time as all the 1970s radios.

I can’t decide if second-hand clothing or clothing made from scratch is more popular – people wear both, sometimes mixing them together. Second-hand clothing is much cheaper than tailored clothing, which can be around 4,000 francs for a skirt, versus the 400-500 francs for second-hand clothing. When people talk about stopping the importation of second-hand clothing to help the Rwandan economy, it drives me crazy. Before coming to Rwanda I was always very strong supportive of allowing second-hand clothing to make its way to African countries, even when the second-hand clothing leads to initial unemployment in local apparel industries, because second-hand clothing creates just as much employment, if not more, as it takes away, not to mention allowing for tons of creativity from all the mixing and matching and tailoring and altering. And wow does it bring out the Loud Yelling Salesman in Rwandans. Now that I am in Rwanda, I still think the same thing, but realize also how insulting it is to local designers to suggest they aren’t good enough to make it with the competition from second-hand clothing. It’s also insulting to the local culture which has its own design aesthetic that it can’t easily import from the West, and which people are willing to pay almost ten times as much money for.

Yeah, people like their Dockers and who would turn away a 500 franc (less than $1) Bannana Republic skirt? And almost no one can afford to. But those puffy-sleeved, brightly-colored, locally made women’s dresses are just as much the rage. In fact, the fact that they are more expensive to make may make them a status-symbol and only add to their popularity.

Sewing machines are everywhere. On market day five to ten or even more women and men are lined up with their sewing machines, in back of the tomato sellers and in front of the banana and sugar cane sellers, fixing up second-hand clothing to fit like a glove or hemming torn skirts and trousers. These are in addition to the at least four tailor shops, each with three or four tailors – one has eight – in each shop.

There is a massive difference between children’s clothing, which are torn and match the dirt roads perfectly, and adult clothing, which is often impeccable. Many workers, including the builders in Agahozo-Shalom, put bags around their shoes to keep them clean. I stopped by the shoe repairmen today to get my usually super-sturdy tire flip-flops fixed and the woman next to me had the cleanest broken shoes I have ever seen in my life. Mine were caked in mud as were quite a few other pairs, which the shoe men carefully cleaned with a piece of metal, taking out the dirt from every tiny crevice on the bottom of every tiny shoe. Seeing him meticulously, carefully take each strand of dirt from my shoe made me think of all the times I just dunk them in water or dirty rain puddles to clean them off. Oh well.