Nalubale Rose, Owino Market
By any standard, raising six children is no easy task. Taking them all through formal education in Uganda is more complex. But if you’re a single mother whose only income is from selling second-hand clothes, then the equation might seem impossible to solve.
Nalubale Rose has sold womens’ blouses at Owino Market for the last 25 years. Her youngest son is doing his O’ Levels. Another is studying at university. The others have graduated. She first reprimands me for asking her how many children she has “We don’t count children” but after laughing my ignorance away she complies shyly, but with pride. “I educated them all… slowly, slowly. Myself.”
I reflect out loud that she is very ‘strong’. ‘No, I’m not strong. I just really wanted them to have an education because I couldn’t go to school. I want them to study”.
Nalubale sells women’s blouses at Owino Market because of the fast turnover, “They move quickly”. A blouse costs anything between 500 and 5000 shillings ($0.10 – $1.20). Her stall is not more than 3 square meters, on a roofed platform from which she and her neighbours look down at pulsating paths, hopeful for shoppers. Underneath the platform, each vendor has a locker where they store their goods at night. Nalubale stocks bales from which she picks her daily offerings in a small store opposite her stall.
Nalubale invites me to climb up to her stall. I sit on a pile of blouses next to her, our backs to another row of stalls. It’s late in the morning on a Tuesday and the market’s stomach is rumbling, ready for lunch. I ask her how many blouses she hopes to sell. We speak Luganda. “I don’t know. God will provide luck! I could sell about 50 blouses or 100 or 30.” She doesn’t like the blouses she sells. “They’re horrible. They used to be good back then, but these (pointing to her stock disapprovingly) are terrible. They don’t look fresh. There used to be beautiful blouses in the bales, nice clothes, but these are dead.”
Nalubale started her life with second-hand clothes at 18. Her sister, then a vendor, introduced her to the trade. Family business. She worked as her sister’s assistant before saving up enough to buy her first bale, a tightly squeezed pack of 300 shirts. These shirts are collected as donations from anywhere in the global north; UK, Australia, Canada, Dubai, China. “From many different places, I’m not so sure, the clothes find me here.”
Second-hand clothing in Uganda gained immense popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s, in part because of the styles, not just the low cost. Bales are comprised of donations from individuals, so this stock for vendors means infinite clothing options for customers, at every price-point and style. And if you’re lucky it would still have the tag on it. Business boomed.
‘Clothes used to be beautiful back then.’
Now, it is different.
Nalubale remarks ‘You know, bales from Korea or China, I don’t even bother with them. They send clothes with holes and stains, even poo stains, they smell! Horrible. They bring rotten clothes.‘
Bales are bought ‘blind’ – meaning a vendor has an idea of what is in the bale (shirts, suits or jeans etc) but they have a limited idea of the quality, exact styles and age of the clothes received until the bale is cut open. However, bale-purchasers must pay up front and figure out how to move the dead stock later. ‘We get a lot of damaged goods. I sell them cheaply. Yes, people buy them and repair them. Look, the sewing machine is there (she points to a tailor sitting opposite her stall). They get their clothes repaired and fitted.’
Once again more out of necessity than heroism, the market carves out systems to turn literal rubbish into points of possibility. A few rows down from where Nalubale sits are corridors of women silently sewing, men noisily steaming, and young entrepreneurs adding a dash of style to a pair of jeans by making a rip in the knee. The sheer volume of people, head down in endless rows, completing the same task repeatedly in a methodical manner (cut, sew, steam, repeat) makes me question the term ‘informal industry’. It reminds me of a factory.
‘Informal Industries’ are largely considered unregulated, and ‘ungovernable’, but this section of the market is a living example of self-organisation, and the opportunity for young adults to create work, and they flock to it.
BOBBY: I used to come here [Owino Market] when I was 13, 16, to buy clothes… it has changed a lot.
NALUBALE: We started out there, where you see the buildings but it was just soil back then. Then they built these stalls for us here. The problem is there are too many people. Vendors now even sell on the paths in between the stalls. There’s no space for us to walk. People don’t have space to shop properly. (ah, nebitutama! annoyed)Even if they build more structures and stalls, there will still be vendors on the floor selling.
Painfully ironically, the market now swells with vendors educated by mothers and fathers like Nalubale. ‘Well, we give birth to these children, don’t we? We don’t know where to send them so we bring them to Owino.’ Informal industries boom as formal ones recede in Uganda. Sam, Nalubale’s son, stands two stalls away from her. He specializes in jeans for women. Samuel is more hopeful about his prospects. That is what informs his choice to stay in the very same work his mother sent him to school not to do. “She knows why I prefer to work here. The company wasn’t paying me enough. I can earn that money on my own. I’m free. ”
BOBBY: Would you have liked to get different work?
NALUBALE: I would have liked to, but “capital” – I put my capital in school fees, so I don’t have capital to do something else.
BOBBY: Do you have many friends here at the market that you’ve known since back then?
NALUBALE: i’ve been here for 25 years so I know most of them, yes. But most of the people I knew back then, they left the trade. They went. They got tired. They’re home maybe. I don’t know. They got other work.
A few customers stop by, some purchase, some browse. It’s still too early in the day to know whether it will be one of profit or loss. What is clear is that Nalubale’s story is not unique it is a pattern. And over a quarter century, this market/industry has supported Nalubale, her children and their education and now their current employment. What remains to be seen, is if this sought-after education will change the quality of work for vendors like Sam, Nalubale’s son.