There’s something unique about recent Western culture. It has managed to not only be the over-arching culture of three separate continents, but it has also weaselled into much more unlikely places. Indian teenagers word perfect on Kanye West, Cambodian women spending big on Nivea, and Tanzanian kids who can re-enact Arnie’s lines from the (awesome) movie Commando. Then there’s the stuff that’s just plain bizarre. I know that I’ve enjoyed a few quiet chuckles at the expense of Ghanaian waiters wearing Australian road safety t-shirts, or a Peruvian kid in a cricket hat from my small hometown, but I think I over-estimated their significance.

For every item of donated second hand clothing that Western NGOs can sell locally through their charity stores (aka thrift stores aka Macklemore), there are often six or eight items of surplus stuff for which no local demand exists. Used textiles is actually the United States’ eighth largest export product, with around 10 billion pounds of it generated there every year. It’s big business.

These mountains of junk are bundled up into 220 pound bales, and sold onto an international market. These are purchased by the tonne by large businesses in countries like Papua New Guinea and Nigeria, then wholesaled downwards in ever-diminishing lot sizes until there is a woman selling 15 items of clothing on the side of a road for £2 each. In this way, Western cultural symbols end up adorning the chests of pretty much everyone. 

A friend and I were walking through a university campus in Ghana one day, and we spotted someone wearing a Mighty Boosh t-shirt, an absurd, cult British TV show. My friend scuttled over to the t-shirt wearer, gearing up for an enthusiastic hipster exchange of one-liners from the show. He was shattered to discover that the wearer had no idea of what The Mighty Boosh is. A similar debacle occurred when one of my former grad students turned up in a Pet Shop Boys tour t-shirt. Awkward times. While Western consumers are in the habit of being quite meticulous about branding and messaging, we have to accept that there are hundreds of millions of people who just don’t give a shit about our precious cultural iconography, despite looking like they do.

These people just want a clean shirt with no holes, at a price they can afford. Some economists complain that the global used clothing industry is crowding out local clothes producers and creating a new dimension of dependency. But I’ve seen people in extreme poverty putting on a brand new (used) pair of shoes, and their self-esteem visibly lifting. The aforementioned economists can beat it; their spreadsheets are failing to tell them the full story.

An article in The Guardian quoted a Zambian used clothes seller, who said “People like shirts with writing on them - it doesn't matter what it says.” So why the preference for writing, even writing they can’t understand (or perhaps even read, given Zambia’s adult literacy rate is around 70%)? My best guess is that they like the idea of making an exotic statement. Of feeling like they’re part of a conversation with the world beyond their town. Your average Zambian lacks the resources and contacts to be heard far from home, so maybe this is an odd little manifestation of that currently unfulfilled desire.

Plenty of the West’s cultural dominance can therefore be attributed to our economic dominance. Dominance in R&D expenditure, investment capital, media reach, and intellectual property. The past five years has seen a China-led swing away from this 20th century status quo, but clearly a large gap generally remains between high income and low income countries. Let’s wrap this up with a question.

Are our Western-branded counterparts in developing countries actually as fond of our cultural icons as we like to think, or is it just a relationship of convenience that will wither once they have the chance to replace them with their own? There are whole nations of people who are currently being excluded from the global conversation due to their poverty. Perhaps we should be doing more to invite them to sit at our table, instead of just feeding them scraps from it.