‘Clothe the naked’, said the well-known playwright, who perhaps saw a bit of Africa in his native Sicily. But in the realm of the truest truths in the world, but which change every minute (and this is what the great American writer remembered), ordinary people dress exactly how they live: in an essential way, in second-hand clothes, sometimes torn and worn, but also however they can, cheaply and focusing on the essentials, without worrying too much.
The centrepiece of this lifestyle, in regions where the Swahili language is spoken, is called ‘Mitumba’.
This name refers to all the used clothing that is literally thrown onto market stalls (the so-called ‘kibanda’) without distinction of type, brand or material.

According to research published in the continental media in recent days, Kenya is the African country that imports the most second-hand fabrics and clothing, despite the government's well-publicised plans to not only abolish their importation, but also to focus (and still does focus) on the domestic production of clothing for Kenyans. As if being competitive with the Chinese giant was easy, and we know very well that it isn't for anyone, not even in the West.
In the meantime, more than Nigeria, more than Ghana and Uganda, let's go for the mitumba, which comes from abroad in bales of one hundred kilograms each, which are bought by ‘cartels’ of what we could call ‘African large-scale distribution’. So, without even trying to sort it, to look for the pearl among the spurious stones, they buy a pig in a poke.

Honey flies. When the bales, wrapped in ropes and laces, are released and explode in all their soft and heterogeneous abundance, in the markets of the main cities of Kenya, the small merchants, the big street vendors, the multiple owners of shacks and small rooms in the smaller towns and rural villages, attack them and take them with vital frenzy, alternating the vision of what is good, a bargain, with the stroke of luck of not finding a moth-eaten sweater or trousers with the inside of the thigh too worn.
A bit at a time, to be resold in the same way: piled up for public ridicule.
And here the great theatre comes into play, the human comedy of cheerful survival that would have surprised and fascinated even Pirandello. In the front row, opulent women dig into the pile of clothes with one arm while with the other they hold tight the child who is fidgeting, attracted by the stall of plastic toys, with the youngest sleeping imperturbably wrapped in a sarong hanging from their neck.
Then old peasant women with bony bodies make their way through, looking everywhere and with eyes clouded by unwitting cataracts, who manage to see the good robe for the day and a suit to ward off mosquitoes in the paraffin-lit darkness of the hut. All around there are sellers shouting out their fixed prices and inviting everyone to participate in the banquet, while others slouch about and let the recorded voices of ‘karibia customers’ be heard coming out of crackly little radios. Some hang their best clothes on improvised and wobbly clothes-pegs, others wave them like flags to show off their pride for the day. The world of the mitumba is an absolutely African world that is worth seeing once in your life.
A world in which no one is a victim and no one is a protagonist, where the bad guys have already done their damage and step aside and the crumbs dance with those who recognise them and are grateful to them for keeping them and the whole show alive.