From the Ashes of Kantamanto: Finding Life in ‘Dead White Man’s Clothes’

On a dazzling late-August day in the heart of Accra, the air around Kantamanto Market crackled with anticipation. Amid a dense thicket of timber-and-metal stalls where secondhand retailers ordinarily hawked their wares, a runner of red-and-green astroturf cut a path toward a stage draped in the tricolor of the Ghanaian flag.

A large crowd of people, many dressed in celebratory white, sat in plastic lawn chairs fanning themselves or milled around with sweating bottles of water in hand. The pulsing music that drowned out the usual chatter of commerce eventually gave way to an opening prayer and a call-and-response of obroni wawu—“dead white men’s clothes” in the local Twi—and oboa oman, or “help the nation.”

When a fire tore through Kantamanto that January, devouring eight acres, or nearly 60 percent of the market’s retail-facing side, the community of 30,000 retailers, traders and vendors all but lost hope in a business model that was already buckling under fashion’s ever-quickening pace.

For decades, West Africa’s largest secondhand market had thrived on the global North’s castoffs, yet a growing deluge of fast fashion and its ultra-fast successors had turned Accra into the world’s clothing graveyard. Kantamanto had overcome incredible odds and scant funding to rebuild, but if the fire made one thing clear, it was the urgent need for change. That included establishing a unified voice across the market’s 13 disparate divisions.

As the sun began to beat down, the day’s ceremony revealed its dual purpose: commemorating the market’s physical resurrection while inaugurating the Kantamanto Obroniwawu Businesses Association, the first to represent Kantamanto as a whole. The community’s survival hinges on “raising the market to a higher standard as one family,” Daniel Ampadu, KOBA’s financial secretary, said afterward. That also means improving the quality of the bales that retailers bid on, mostly sight unseen, in what has become a kind of high-stakes lottery.

Everything eventually comes down to the bale: a nearly three-foot-long brick of compressed clothing from exporters in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and continental Europe that can weigh at least 120 pounds. Once a reliable source of hope, it has increasingly become a reason for anguish, particularly on Wednesdays and Saturdays—the designated market days—when freshly offloaded bales with labels like “U.K. Mixed Ladies’ Tops” or “Canada Men’s Jeans” are freed from their straps and sliced open with muttered prayers to release an explosion of color and texture.

“It’s like gambling,” said Abena Essoun, who worked as a retailer for years before joining The Or Foundation, an environmental nonprofit fighting Accra’s textile waste crisis, as its community outreach coordinator. “You’re always owing, always in debt. You’re always thinking of the money you’re spending on the bale. The moment you open the bale, your blood pressure goes up.”

Retailers often use their stalls as collateral for loans, she said. When a string of bad bales makes it impossible to stay in front of debt, many end up losing their stores, forced to return to their villages. Though passing on a stall to the next generation is the norm in Kantamanto, Essoun has refused to allow her children to follow her into the trade.

“It hurts you,” she added. “You give someone money and lose everything.”

A hard sell

Retailers say the quality of the clothing has worsened over the years, with many shipments filled with garments too torn, stained, faded or flimsy to resell. Some are seasonally inappropriate—for instance, winter puffers in a city where the temperature rarely falls below 77 degrees Fahrenheit—or cut for oversized Western silhouettes that dwarf the average Ghanaian body. Others arrive with traces of bodily fluids, signs of mildew or the unmistakable whiff of body odor—too appalling to offer even as the cheapest “third selection.”

“These are literally unsellable items,” said Yayra Agbofah, who worked as a trader in Kantamanto before founding The Revival, a community-led sustainable design initiative that won a Global Change Award from H&M Foundation. “The used clothing trade isn’t profit-making anymore. It has become a debt-accruing business.”

Though the figure is sometimes disputed, The Or Foundation estimates that of the 15 million garments flowing into Kantamanto weekly, 40 percent exit as garbage in short order. When Accra’s sole engineered landfill at Kpone burst into flames in 2019, the city lost all official disposal capacity.

Now clothing sits in piles: piles stacked wall-to-ceiling in Kantamanto’s labyrinthine warren of stores; piles that clog gutters and cause drainage problems whenever it rains; piles that drift into the formerly pristine Korle Lagoon, where Gulf of Guinea tides churn and regurgitate them onto the shore as massive, tentacle-like conglomerations; piles that are burned accidentally or purposefully, creating persistent, toxic fire hazards.

While no official cause has yet been given for the fire that started razing Kantamanto in the waning hours of Jan. 1, 2025, the Ghana National Fire Service suspects it was ignited by unauthorized electrical wiring or an unattended open flame used for cooking or heat by those working or sleeping in the stalls after hours. The spread of the fire was rapid, an official report noted, “due to the nature of combustibles,” a reference to the large amounts of extremely flammable clothing. Two people died in the inferno: one from injuries and burns and the other because of cardiac distress. Another 10,000 kept their lives but lost everything else.

Liz Ricketts, a former New York fashion stylist who co-founded The Or Foundation with Branson Skinner in 2011, has mixed feelings about the term “resilient.” She’s used it to describe Kantamanto, especially during the first few days of the fire relief effort. But relying on the idea of resilience also feeds into a “bootstrap narrative,” she said, one that implies that the market’s community should just be expected to “get on with it” without the benefit of broad support.

“The truth is that the market did not only rebuild quickly out of strength; it was also out of fear and desperation,” she said. “People were so afraid of losing their space in the market that they slept there, on rubble with no mat and inhaling dust and fumes from burnt clothes.”

In the fire’s immediate wake, The Or Foundation quickly released $1 million in emergency funds for direct relief. The organization raised another $465,500 through crowdfunding and direct donations from D-Brand, Puma, Vestiaire Collective and a handful of Belgian brands—still far less than the $5 million it estimated would be needed to rebuild Kantamanto not just as it was, but with improvements to prevent a similar catastrophe, such as regularly spaced fire extinguishers, a standardized electrical grid that meets national standards and a Kantamanto Security Service to patrol the premises, especially after dark.

The Revival also tried to muster funds, with similarly limited results. A contribution from Bestseller Foundation provided direct cash assistance and helped replace sewing machines and other essential tools, but most of the rebuilding has been driven by the community itself, which “says a lot about where responsibility is currently sitting,” Agbofah said.

“The response from global fashion brands has not matched the scale of the crisis in Kantamanto,” he added. “While the market absorbs the consequences of overproduction daily, moments like this reveal how little accountability exists when things collapse.”

Resurrecting Kantamanto

The Or Foundation would end up spending $2.95 million of its own cash on reconstruction and fire relief, its fundraising efforts dwarfed by the wildfires that struck Los Angeles just two weeks later. Donors, including brands like Gap Inc., Nike, Target and the Walt Disney Co., went on to raise nearly $1 billion for the Palisades and Eaton conflagrations—the largest amount ever mobilized for any U.S. natural disaster, according to the Milken Institute.

For Ricketts, who now faces the daunting task of replacing the money her organization spent or cutting existing programs, the disparity wasn’t surprising, but it was disappointing. She recalled the storm of criticism she faced for accepting $15 million over three years from the Chinese e-tailer Shein in 2022, even though it was a rare example of a brand forking out to fix a waste problem it helped create.

The money expanded The Or Foundation’s Mabilgu program, allowing kayayei—the young women who weave through Kantamanto’s narrow passageways transporting the heavy bales on their heads—to transition out of work that causes chronic injuries such as spinal compression and neck fractures or, with one false move, can result in death. It financed fiber-to-fiber recycling initiatives that found new uses for ground-up clothing, such as a pressed fiberboard for acoustic panels, speaker frames, hangers—even furniture. It underwrote entrepreneurship grants and “rapid response” funds that acted as an informal insurance policy.

Now it was also helping resurrect Kantamanto from the ashes.

Other companies weren’t exactly clamoring to do the same. On the contrary, it was labels from more “reputable” names that The Or Foundation and the youth-led group Tide Turners regularly cut from tangled masses of clothing so embedded along the Jamestown coast they require hoes or machetes to excavate them from the wet sand.

The sheer volume of labels collected from 3,800 brands over two years of weekly beach cleanups underpins “Tag Ur It,” a forensic audit quantifying Accra’s biggest polluters. Every week, 60 paid beach cleaners—and sometimes just as many volunteers—wearing high-visibility vests and gloves descend upon Jamestown Beach to painstakingly remove 30 tons of commingled textile and plastic waste. It’s a process that takes hours: The bags must be manually hoisted up steep stone steps, past bent-over women smoking fish and sun-drying chilis, and trucked to a sanctioned dumpsite over 30 miles from the coast. And yet every week, the trash keeps coming back.

“Sometimes we’re motivated; sometimes we’re discouraged,” said David Akpabile, The Or Foundation’s cleanup lead. “We’ve come to understand that there is always more to do. We can’t control what’s happening.”

Indeed, a “first selection” item today would have been a “third selection” one 10 years ago, according to retailers, fewer than 20 percent of whom might make a profit from bales that can cost between $200 and $700. Kantamanto’s reopening ceremony may have marked victory over adversity, but the morning after also offered many community members a grim reminder that the market needed repairs beyond its infrastructure.

Among them was Pat Serwaa, who was sorting through a bale of leggings from London with practiced ease. Her colorful outfit and warm smile belied a heavy heart. It was a bad bale, she said, pointing to a pair of leggings spotted with menstrual blood. There were many just like them. In front of her, a pile of black leggings grew steadily higher, though few would find buyers. In Ghana, black is the color of mourning.

Over in the next aisle, Gifty Anderson, who typically buys bales from Canada and the United Kingdom, held up a dress smeared with body makeup and tossed it aside without a second thought. A button-down Hawaiian print shirt looked promising until a customer pointed out a hole in the shoulder. Another topper, this one in a vibrant jungle print, was completely soiled. “See how dirty,” she said, clicking her tongue. A camisole with white daisies? Stained. A maroon party frock? Too short for local sensitivities.

Nearby, Gloria Amposah was barely visible among mounds of women’s tops and dresses from the Netherlands. She could barely speak, oscillating between annoyance and what she could only describe as a “deep pain.” It was the same story: The clothing came torn, discolored, stained, damp—not even good enough to use as rags for cleaning. Even so, Gloria had no other options. Everything she had burned up in the fire. She had poured her last savings into the business. There was nothing else to give.

“Are there no good clothes in Europe?” she finally asked.

Taming recycling’s ‘Wild West’

Clothing exporters have pushed back at this narrative, saying that the calculus doesn’t make sense.

“Our business is based on continuity; you don’t build a container, sell it and walk away,” Steven Bethell, co-founder of Bank & Vogue, Canada’s largest broker of secondhand clothing, said from his home in Ontario. “You need a customer to take it every single month. If there’s a quality problem and a customer can’t make a living at it, they’ll stop ordering and they’ll go to another vendor. If 40 percent of what goes to the market is garbage, who would continually order a container that’s, let’s say, $60-$70,000? It defies logic.”

Clothing a rag trader like him receives from charity shops, thrift stores and clothing banks—once the “cream” is skimmed off, that is—is sorted manually into 250 grades and categories of product: an A-grade men’s shirt, for instance, shouldn’t show yellowing on the collar or be missing any buttons. There’s room for human error, such as when someone throws something in the wrong pile because they missed a rip or stain, but the fail rate, by Bethell’s estimation, is still roughly 2-4 percent. If there’s a bad actor dumping garbage, he added, they’re “not going to last.”

“We as an industry, we’re scratching our head over where the 40 percent figure comes from,” Bethell said.

In the East London town of Romford, 14 miles northeast of Charing Cross, lies Gallman’s End Farm, a compound filled with barns, sheds and other agricultural outbuildings that now houses ELT Global, which bills itself as a pioneer in textile reuse and recycling. Sitting in an upstairs office one January afternoon, a large flat-screen monitoring the sorting space below, Ian Newton, the company’s managing director, railed against the “lies, lies, lies,” that plague the “Wild West” that is his industry.

“The truth is that from the U.K., Ghana gets good product,” he said. “We don’t give Ghana rubbish. Every single thing that gets touched, if it’s ripped, damaged or smells, gets chucked away. So where does the rubbish come from? Well, if you look closely, you’ll see it comes from China. It comes from unsorted plants. It comes from other parts of Africa. We supply A grade. They get the best product quality.”

At the same time, Newton also admitted that this same quality has plummeted over the past two to three decades, even as the volume of garments continues to soar. The math, as he put it, isn’t quite working anymore. Before he was interrupted by a reporter, Newton was working on a paper for the Chartered Institute of Waste Management about the Salvation Army’s decision to pull its clothing banks from household waste recycling center sites across the United Kingdom. Simply put, the glut of low-quality donated clothing no longer made collection financially feasible.

Two other industry groups—the European Recycling Industries’ Confederation and Municipal Waste Europe—have also warned that the industry is on the verge of collapse.

As global trade teeters on the brink, experts say it’s getting harder to draw a straight line from a mold-spotted going-out top from a charity shop in, say, London’s Mayfair district to a stall in Kantamanto. While companies like Bank & Vogue and ELT Global still undertake the grueling, time-consuming work of sorting at the source, they’re outliers. Most operators simply bale their collections and blindly dispatch them to transit hubs in Eastern Europe or Dubai, where overheads and labor are cheaper.

Even bales containing items conspicuously tagged with the British Red Cross or Oxfam could have passed through other sorting geographies, resulting in a series of increasingly opaque handoffs with progressively less accountability, said Cristina Sabaiduc, textiles sector specialist at Waste and Resources Action Programme, the U.K. environmental nonprofit better known by its acronym WRAP.

“There also isn’t a global standard for sorting requirements,” she said. “There are many trade organizations and associations globally that work with the sector to have best practice implementation, and Europe has some guidelines for sorters, but none of it gets into the nitty-gritty of what you should be sorting to in the grades. This is something that is hopefully in development: it increases transparency and trust in the sector and ultimately creates a potentially traceable route as well for items.”

A quiet crisis

In Accra, where the reality of untrammeled production is more than academic—or a matter of debate—Kantamanto cannot wait for the West to get its act together.

Slightly over a mile from the market, perched on the banks of Korle Lagoon, is Old Fadama, an informal settlement where tens of thousands of people live on top of decades of refuse. Looming overhead is a 66-foot mountain carved not from earth or stone but a fossilized accretion of plastic waste and unwanted clothing. Festering below, stagnant water emanates the telltale smell of rotten eggs, likely a mix of methane and sulfur dioxide. Occasionally, a bubble forms, then pops. All this is a testament to the global North’s unceasing churn arriving at its final sink.

Kantamanto is trying to wrest back some measure of control. Two years ago, The Or Foundation kick-started Kanta Keepers, an initiative-turned-co-op that supplements municipal efforts to heave away unwanted textiles from the market, intercepting the waste at its source before it escapes into the environment. Every evening, right as the market closes, a team of 40 people chosen by Kantamanto’s leaders moves anywhere between seven and 20 tons of castoff garments, to be trucked to the same sanctioned dumpsite that the Tide Turners use.

But not every aspect of the global North’s overproduction is so visceral. A survey of 100 retailers that Farihana Baba Mahamoud, The Or Foundation’s nursing officer, helped conduct found higher-than-normal stress levels in community members manifesting as chronic hypertension and anxiety. Their diets lack nutrients because fresh produce is often prohibitively expensive. The prolonged sitting required to man their stalls for hours at a time can also lead to issues with heart disease, obesity and diabetes. And if they feel trapped, it’s because they are. The problem of bales is a systemic one: they can try a different importer or another country of origin, but it’s all become the same.

Mahamoud is now working with an epidemiologist in the United States to analyze blood samples from retailers to see if the data might shed light on the effects of chronic exposure to airborne microfibers. A sampling team also treks hours on foot every week to collect water and soil samples at Korle Lagoon and along Jamestown’s beaches to monitor microfiber pollution.

“If we just zoom out, the system is just inherently illogical,” said Katia Osei, a Harvard-trained bioengineer and head of environmental justice at The Or Foundation. “You’re making these clothes that you know won’t go anywhere, that are covered with all these toxic chemicals that you’re banning in your own countries for good reason, and you’re intentionally allowing this system to go unchecked because it gives you a back door to just keep producing more and more.”

Osei can usually be found at the Material Technology & Transformation Lab, an innovation and community space on the edge of Kantamanto, where she sometimes tinkers with a water filtration system comprising tanks filled with biochar, gravel and plants that have somehow survived against all odds.

The idea was to build something, “with little to no science or engineering,” where dirty water at one end comes out clean at the other, she said. Osei has been feeding it polluted water from a nearby canal. What’s been pouring out—she’s done the testing for heavy metals and E. coli—is pristine.

“Everything here is solar powered, so zero energy, zero waste; we don’t even really use water that we don’t take from our system unless we need distilled water for science,” she said. “We wanted to show the community that life can clean water, because ultimately, we know we can take out the plastic from the canals and Korle and all of that, but life is going to do a lot of the hard work.”

The Or Foundation has taken to hanging purple signs around its spaces bearing the words, “Welcome to the Future,” a reminder that progress often involves care that’s rooted in community rather than what Osei describes as “extraction, technofixes or distant policy rooms.”

Taking accountability

Even within Ghana, some groups are pushing back against the waste-dumping narrative, which they say is a “serious misrepresentation” of the country’s secondhand trade.

“The secondhand clothing industry is a structured and specialized global supply chain,” said Edward Atobrah Binkley, general secretary of the Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association. “Before coming to Ghana, garments undergo sorting and grading, including manual inspection for quality and cleanliness. Once the bales reach Ghana, government regulators—the Ghana Standards Authority and the Ghana Shippers Authority—oversee goods entering the country before any bales reach Kantamanto.”

Multiple studies of Ghana’s textile trade, Binkley said, show that less than 5 percent of imported secondhand clothes are unsellable or unusable. He added that the used-clothing trade dresses as many as 95 percent of Ghanaians “well and with dignity,” while contributing tens of millions of dollars in annual taxes to the local economy.

“Our supplier relationships are built on reputation, trust and commercial contracts,” Binkley added. “We do not import waste. Ghana’s secondhand clothing industry is a cornerstone of the global textile circular economy, preventing rather than creating waste, saving resources and supporting our economy.”

Still, the pushback doesn’t change what Ricketts experiences as a far messier reality, albeit one with clear workarounds. As extended producer responsibility schemes ramp up in the United States and Europe, for instance, the money they generate could be a turning point for places like Kantamanto, where people have spent decades shouldering the burden of a crisis they did not create. Like with fire relief, however, most of that cash is staying in the rich nations where it’s being collected.

“I think it’s very important that people recognize that even amid all of these challenges, the community here is still presenting the best solution,” she said. “But, of course, oversupply and overproduction are at the root of the issue, and the industry shows no real acknowledgement of this, and certainly no commitments toward displacement targets.”

It’s for this reason that The Or Foundation has been urging brands to publicly disclose their annual production volumes. Without transparent data, it’s difficult to hold the industry accountable for its sustainability promises—or even know how much it produces to begin with. Of the more than 1,000 brands it’s asked to “Speak Volumes,” however, fewer than 200 have responded.

KOBA has big ambitions, as well, including turning Kantamanto into a self-sustaining zero-waste ecosystem. The leaders said, however, that they cannot accomplish this alone.

The women who make up the majority of retailers have also organized themselves to form the Kantamanto Women’s Association, which will work closely with KOBA. Its aim, said Mary Sarkodie, a retail veteran and one of its nine heads, is to claim a seat at the table, “making our voices heard” wherever the male-dominated market leadership cannot. When the association held its first meeting, 600 women turned up to raise raw concerns: how could they afford their children’s school fees? Could they imagine retirement? Who would think about their welfare?

“We don’t want people talking on our behalf,” she said. “Whether you like it or not, you have to listen to us.”

This is the fundamental tension at the heart of the market and, indeed, the entire secondhand clothing industry: Who gets to have a say in how things ultimately shake out?

At the close of Kantamanto’s reopening ceremony, more than eight months after flames consumed acres of livelihoods, the crowd broke out in an impromptu dance party. There was more work to be done—there always is—but for now, this was a moment to rejoice.

Still, real life also has a way of intruding. In a matter of hours, a man carrying a woman on his back would race toward the entrance in search of transportation to the hospital. A bale had fallen on top of her. “This happens a lot,” someone whispered.

To the south, deep within Korle Lagoon, the tides continued to roil.

This article was published in SJ’s sustainability report. Click here to read more.