How did a market built through dispossession become central to the everyday livelihoods of millions of East Africans, yet remain one of the country’s most precarious and contested urban spaces?

In this episode of Sera na Sauti, Ruth Nyakerario, a researcher and writer whose work centers on urban marginality, displacement, and informal systems, speaks with Mwangi Mwaura, a PhD candidate in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford.

Mwangi’s research traces the journey of secondhand clothes from UK sorting warehouses to Nairobi’s Gikomba Market. But this is not just about the clothing trade. It is about disposability as a system, about how value is assigned and stripped away from garments, from spaces, from people. His work combines ethnography, mapping, and audio-visual storytelling to trace how secondhand clothes navigate global and local systems, and how those systems mirror the logics that decide which urban spaces are protected and which are left to burn. He lived in Gikomba during his university days, and his research foregrounds the lived realities of the traders and communities who make the market what it is.

Gikomba’s history is inseparable from displacement: born in the 1930s-1940s as a settlement for civil servants, it became a refuge for traders repeatedly pushed out of Nairobi’s streets. Today, it anchors the livelihoods of thousands. Yet it has burned down over and over again, through the 1952 colonial Emergency, through independence, into the present. These fires are not accidents. They are governance. They are the state’s answer to spaces it cannot control, markets it refuses to formalise, and communities it would rather not see.

Mwangi’s research follows the global secondhand clothing trade and exposes its racialized architecture. High-quality donated clothes are sorted and sent to Japan. Medium-quality items go to Latin America. Africa gets what remains. This is not coincidence. It is racial capitalism: a system that requires inequality, particularly racial inequality, to function. The same logic that grades clothes in UK warehouses also grades urban spaces in Nairobi, deciding which neighborhoods receive infrastructure and protection, and which are left exposed to fire, eviction, and state violence.

The conversation confronts the paradox at the centre of the trade: secondhand clothes sustain millions of livelihoods, yet they also make African markets the dumping ground for the Global North’s overproduction. Mwangi does not call for bans. He calls for accountability. Extended producer responsibility would shift the burden back to fast fashion companies, making them responsible for the waste they generate rather than offloading it onto precarious economies. The problem is not individual consumers. It is the system that treats disposal as inevitable and Africa as the place where things, and people, are discarded.

Drawing on Southern urbanism, Mwangi reframes how we understand African cities. Gikomba is not chaos. It is not marginal. It is a space produced through survival, strategy, and resistance. Yet it is constantly treated as disposable. His research insists on centering the traders’ knowledge, their networks, their agency. He also reflects on the ethics of his work: how to conduct research that does not extract, that does not feed into policies of erasure, and that represents Gikomba’s reality without reducing it to data or tragedy.

📌 Key themes from the conversation:

✅ How Gikomba’s recurring fires since the 1940s reveal governance through erasure, and why informal markets are treated as spaces the state can destroy with impunity

✅ The racialized structure of the global secondhand clothing trade, where Africa receives the lowest-grade items while higher-quality clothes are sorted to Japan and Latin America

✅ Racial capitalism as the framework that structures both the clothing trade and urban governance, relying on inequality to sustain itself

✅ The grading systems for secondhand clothes and how the same logics of value and disposability are applied to neighborhoods, markets, and lives

✅ Extended producer responsibility as a way to hold fast fashion accountable for waste, rather than making African markets absorb the consequences

✅ Southern urbanism and why informal markets like Gikomba disrupt dominant ideas about planning, infrastructure, and what counts as a legitimate city

✅ The lives, strategies, and agency of Gikomba’s traders, who build systems of value and survival in the face of constant precarity

✅ The ethics of research in informal spaces: how to engage without extracting, and how to ensure the work does not contribute to policies of displacement or harm

✅ Why consumerism is systemic, not individual, and how the lifecycle of clothing reveals deeper structures of inequality and waste

Gikomba survives because it has to. Because the people who depend on it have no other choice, and because the state has never offered an alternative. But survival is not the same as security. This episode asks what it would mean to recognize informal markets not as problems to be managed or erased, but as economies that sustain millions, and to build policy, infrastructure, and urban planning around that recognition.

📚Reading Materials and Other Resources:

* People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg by Abdoumaliq Simone

* Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia by Karen Tranberg Hansen (Book on Second-hand clothes in Zambia)

* Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore (The amazing Abolition Geographer, a nice profile of her and her work, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html)

* Whose crime? Arson, class warfare and traders in Nairobi, 1940-2000 by Claire C. Robertson (the brilliant article that documents cases of arson across Nairobi between 1940-2000, capturing how these cases of fires are part of the story of the violent birth of Nairobi)

* Janet Chemitei (the lovely Slow Fashion educator Mwangi quoted as we he was speaking of her activism)

* Africa Collect Textiles, ACT (the organisation that does Up-cycling and is envisioning and working on what sustainable fashion can look like. They also receive clothes discarded at different points across Nairobi.

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