Fast Fashion in Ghana and Kenya: The Lived Disaster of Capitalism’s Devaluation of Life

Critical Ecologies

Fast fashion illustrates the social and environmental disasters that lie in the wake of capitalism’s ever-increasing hunger for profits. Everything in the path to profit is devalued and made disposable: environment, place, and people. The experiences of secondhand clothes traders in Ghana and Kenya are the lived reality of this devaluation in practice, where they are sold, for profit, Global North textile waste deliberately disguised as commodities. The outcome of this unequal ‘trade’ sees the pollution of their homes and their bodies, and the destruction of the web of life within which they survive. Degrowth, in its call to reduce consumption and replace GDP based economic growth with the growth of human and environmental wellbeing, offers a different path. However, degrowth approaches must democratize themselves by also becoming decolonial. Those who experience the greatest cost of fast fashion must be the people to decide how the future is to be shaped, lest capitalism’s disasters be reproduced anew.