Multi-award winning fashion designer Nkwo Onwuka can’t keep up with the demand for her outfits: they are worn on catwalks and red carpets from her home in Nigeria to Europe, the UK and the US, and chosen for museum collections. What is unique about her brand is that many NKWO garments are made from upcycled denim and Dakala cloth, a fabric she invented using studio waste and denim, along with traditional Aso-oke fabric from Nigeria.
Opening the African Textile Talks 2024 this month in Cape Town, Onwuka said she was not going to give a technical lesson on waste innovation. Instead, she said, “I am going to tell you a story about how climate change affects us directly and how I’m affecting it back directly.”
The Nigeria-based trailblazer and fellow designers — from Ghana, Senegal, Uganda and South Africa — are alchemists. They change textile waste into fashion while transforming the lives of those who work with them and supporting traditional craft skills in their countries.
Sustainability, social justice and fashion organisation, Twyg, and the Imiloa Collective, organised the African Textile Talks held last week at the V&A Waterfront to bring designers like them, textile makers, waste re/upcyclers, farmers and other players from the continent together to share their vision of a “post-fossil fuel fashion and textile industry which cares about the planet”.
South Africa’s merino wool and hemp were at the centre of an exhibit for the talks, showcasing natural fibres and upcycled fabrics. About 60% of textiles are made of fossil fuels and, according to a wool advert: “Every 25 minutes an Olympic-size pool of oil is used to make synthetic clothing.”
These textile talks are more important to our future than the day’s headlines, said the MC and veteran broadcaster Africa Melane, referring to the departure of EFF deputy head Floyd Shivambu from the party. To my left, designer Sheena Devey listened while sketching the outlines of a dress.
Weaving circles of life in Nigeria
Onwuka started her keynote presentation with a story about climate change in the region she calls home. “Some years ago Lake Chad was the largest water source in the Sahel region and today it has shrunk by about 90%,” she said.
Fishermen can no longer fish there. Cattle herders moved away and into areas occupied by other farmers, triggering conflict over grazing. The Boko Haram insurgency to the north, meanwhile, has forced more than a million people to flee their ancestral homes into IDP (internally displaced person) camps.
“In 2014 I was working in the UK but my soul did not belong there. I finally found the courage to go back to Nigeria and set up a studio in Abuja,” said Onwuka. She had a return ticket but never used it.
“My impact was very small but one day I got introduced to women at an IDP camp,” she said. Onwuka intended to teach two or three women there to weave but then 10 signed up. “By the end of six weeks, all 10 were like sisters,” said the designer, who recruited them all to join her team at the “transformation centre”.
“If you take a group of people, treat them well, teach them how to use their hands and how to make a sustainable living, they will take this to their circle and start building up that circle, and at the end of the day you have all these circles and ripples. People are able to live better, to build their communities and preserve their craft skills.
“Little changes can make a huge difference,” Onwuka said.
Fashioning a living from ‘dead white man’s clothes’ in Ghana
Fashion designer and activist Samuel Oteng has also made a world of difference working in Ghana, in Accra’s Kantamanto community where there is a huge second-hand clothing market. “For my first project in fashion school I went to Kantamanto to find free materials and I found such a positive energy” he said of that resilient community.
Here more than 30,000 people sort, recycle, repair and remake garments sent from the global north to Ghana. They are known as “dead white man’s clothes” because in their country people don’t simply discard clothes.
The West African country has become a dumping ground for fast fashion waste, under the guise of donations. Every week about 15-million garments land in Ghana. Roughly 40% have such bad stains, tears and other wear that they cannot be salvaged, despite the creativity of the tailors in the market’s circular economy.
These discarded garments end up polluting the country’s rivers and beaches, some of which are covered in tangled garment waste. South Africa prohibits this type of importing.
As well as regular river clean-ups and water and soil sampling, the team at the nonprofit The Or Foundation, where Oteng works as the senior community engagement manager, does a beach cleanup every month. Zara, M&S, adidas, Nike and Reebok are among the brand labels on the garments they drag out of the sand and sea.
If you take a group of people, treat them well, teach them how to use their hands and how to make a sustainable living, they will take this to their circle...at the end of the day you have all these circles and ripples
— Fashion designer Nkwo Onwuka
Oteng slams the out-of-control trade of second-hand garments to Ghana as “waste colonialism”, which lures workers at the Kantamanto market into a debt trap. “When people buy the bales they have no idea what is in them or the quality,” he said.
This drops buyers into debt of $1.58 (about R28) per bale before they even open it. If the bale is bad quality, they fall deeper into debt, borrowing money to buy another, hopefully better one, to recover their losses.
Women known as kayayei transport heavy bundles from bales in Kantamanto on their heads for only R6 (5 Ghanian Cedi)/km on average. “They can carry up to 550kg in a day just to put food on the table,” Oteng said. “This is the burden of fast fashion.”
Within eight weeks, the women carrying bundles of their heads start having irreversible damage to their spine, research has shown, said Hajara “Nabia” Musah Chambas, who works with the kayeyei.
Despite these grim conditions, Oteng discovered a determined mindset and skill set in Kantamanto, which keeps its circular economy turning. “We are working there for a justice-led circular economy which prioritises taking care of the people,” he said.
Fatima Suwiah is one such person. Through The Or Foundation’s Mabilgu (sisterhood) and community business incubator programmes, she and other women formed the Kuoro Earth team, which designs and makes wearable accessories and home goods from waste.
In June, the French design institute L’Atelier des Adeɛyie celebrated Kantamanto brands such as theirs in a pop-up show in Paris, said Chambas.
Clothes recycling in South African cities and natural fibres on the farms
South Africa has its own initiatives, such as Taking Care of Business (TCB, formerly The Clothing Bank), for creating jobs through the recycling of surplus clothing, typically using pre-consumer not post-consumer garments.
TCB co-founder Tracey Gilmore said about a thousand women work in its resale programme and they receive about two-million items in a year from retailers. They have centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and East London offering opportunities in four programmes, where women have a safe space to learn skills and work.
Their remodelling programme upskills individuals, for example by learning to sew on industrial machines. “They made sleeping bags out of old banners which were donated to shelters in Cape Town,” said Gilmore.
“We rely on radical collaboration,” she said, lauding 16 big retail partners which donate their surplus stock to TCB. Woolworths was the first to donate when they started in 2010 and Mr Price is now one of the biggest donors, along with many fast fashion outlets.
Retailer H&M has led the way in South Africa in sourcing much of its wool here and supporting the sustainable development of 85 farms. Beauty Mokgwamme from the Mohair Empowerment Trust (MET) works with black entrepreneurs to advance regenerative farming practices.
Practical support, such as buying a higher quality rams interest free, training and the commercialisation of wool have improved their production. MET-supported farmers produce about 25,000kg of mohair a year, she said.
“When Beauty called me and told me H&M wants to talk to me, I did not know what is H&M,” said merino wool farmer Simphiwe Fani, from Somerset East. While he gets support from them he does not have to sell to them only. “Now my animals are living a healthier life and I get a good price for them,” Fani said.
Cape Wools SA CEO Deon Saayman said they worked with 45,000 communal wool farmers who do not own their land. With support, their wool production has more than doubled in the last decade.
Hemp pioneer Ayanda Bam, co-founder and CEO of TexTTan, spoke about his vision to create jobs and sequester carbon through expanding hemp production. Sappi sustainability GM, Krelyne Andrew, explained their forest-to-fibre process for making dissolving pulp to produce viscose fibres.
The final speaker, botanist Rupert Koopman, closed the circle by coming back to the role nature plays as the source of everything people need to survive: from air and water to food and the materials used for textiles and fashions.
An expert in fynbos, which has 9,000 species, Koopman said: “Habitat loss is going to nail a lot of species before climate change gets to them. If we are harvesting wild flowers, we need enough seed for reproduction. We must harvest raw materials sustainably.”
Twyg founder Jackie May wrapped up saying: “(Ecologist) Debra Roberts once told me, ‘We’ve spent centuries trying to keep nature out of cities and now we need to bring nature back into cities to help us build resilience’. It is important that we put nature at the centre of our decision-making. If we do this, we will be better equipped to care for land and the living world in an uncertain future.
“We are working to inspire a fashion and textiles industry without fossil-fuel based fabrics, one that does not burden African countries with the unpaid responsibility to clean up the global industry’s excess,” she said.
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