Memorial Market in Moshi is an impressive used clothes market. Located about 5km (3.1 miles) west of Moshi proper, the market is packed on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Apparently Moshi's old clothes market in the neighborhood of Kiborloni was shut down in 2007 and all sellers relocated to Memorial which still looks like it was put up overnight with its maze of crudely built stalls.
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| Jeans section...rows after rows of stalls. |
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| I could probably make a blog entirely based on the randomness of the t-shirts that I see here. |
It's difficult to get your bearings in Memorial due to the seemingly random and chaotic layout of the market. However, with time the market begins to show the method behind the madness. Booths with similar goods cluster together with "departments" having dress shirts, jeans, blankets, hats, dress shoes, etc. While some booths are organized with cleaned goods on hangers, some are simply a pile of unsorted clothes with a seller (usually a woman) shouting the price to attract buyers.
The journey from wherever they've come from in the developed world is an interesting one and I'll recommend the book, "
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade" to anyone who is truly curious about how your donations of clothes reach Africa. One section in particular takes a good look at how sellers buy from an auction style sale of bundles of clothes straight out of the shipping crates. The contents are unknown so bidders risk buying a giant sack full of soiled and hardly wearable clothes while another load could have barely touched designer clothes from a Goodwill in a rich suburb of America. Thus, the market is also full of a wide range of goods from barely wearable to quality clothing.
I've used memorial market to buy shoes, work pants and a blanket. It can be a bit of an overwhelming and patience is necessary if you want to find a good deal!
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| Very poorly constructed and temporary looking |
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| Ana looks for a new shirt. Notice the megaphone that is used to shout out the price...any shirt in this pile was 500 TZS ($0.30) |
I like My Tanzania times blog especially about Memorial Second hand clothes Market. Here is blog post about travel tips like booking hotels in Moshi. People want to climb Kilimanjaro, need accommodation in Moshi.
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