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Bobby Kolade has a slogan: “Return to the sender” – in French, “return to sender”. It is also the name of his first line of clothing, marketed last spring. With its mark Buzigahill, named after a hill in Kampala, the young designer has made it his mission to recover, redesign, recut and above all resell at high prices the second-hand clothes thrown away by Western consumers and which end up in sub-Saharan Africa, where they pile up on market stalls or in open dumps. A practice known as“upcycling”, which could be roughly translated as “recycling from the top”, and which consists of creating from recycled parts a product of higher quality than the original material.
Visually, the bet is successful: the 250 pieces in the collection, all unique by definition, juxtapose patterns and textures but keep sober cuts well in tune with the times – they are moreover almost all unisex. Count all the same around 400 euros for a hooded sweatshirt, 375 euros for jeans and more than 200 euros for a t-shirt… A sum beyond the reach of most scholarships in Uganda, where the average salary is valued at fifty euros. Bobby Kolade is well aware of this:
“We have a few customers here in Kampala, but at the moment we are not targeting the Ugandan market. It’s not for nothing that we speak of “return to sender”: above all, we seek to sell our clothes in the countries of the North. »
Cotton production collapsed
Because behind the artistic project, Buzigahill is above all a committed approach. Cotton production has collapsed in Uganda since the 1970s, those of the dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada, to the point that the country now exports almost all of its raw material. Bobby Kolade recounts having made the sad observation of this in 2018, when he returned to the country after having spent the first part of his career in Europe, at Maison Margiela and Balenciaga. “Our textile industry is in a sorry state and its decline continues, he sighs. There are only two factories left in the whole country. » The local market is suffocated by the continuous influx of second-hand clothes from Western dumpsters.
“These second-hand clothes are so cheap that local production has no chance of competing with them, so we don’t produce enough textiles to clothe our own people. »
A phenomenon that can be found in Kenya, Ghana, the Central African Republic and even South Africa, where the trade in second-hand clothing is illegal. A legacy of colonialism, according to Bobby Kolade:
“If we take on the one hand the introduction of cotton as a cash crop in Uganda by the British Imperial East Africa Company in the last century, and on the other hand the constant stream of second-hand clothes arrive today from the United Kingdom, it can be said that colonialism never really ended. It has changed form since independence [en 1962], through trade or charity, but we still find ourselves prisoners of a colonial system. The raw materials are still extracted and exported from African countries and it is to us that we resell the waste from the West. »
A more accessible second line
Despite the provocative title of its first collection, Buzigahill is not just a snub to the injustices of globalized fashion. Bobby Kolade aims to build on this first high-end success to finance his social projects and develop his NGO, Aiduke Clothing Research, intended to help other Ugandan designers reach an international audience. His current team operates with thirteen employees, eleven of whom are local, but the designer is thinking big:
“ Within five years, Buzigahill and Aiduke will work together to develop a whole value chain and we will have created a thousand jobs. »
A second line, more accessible and this time aimed at the local market, is already in preparation. “ It is important for us to see Ugandans wearing clothes made in Uganda by Ugandans,” insists Bobby Kolade, who claims to want to include his approach in a structural transformation of the economy:
“So much still needs to change before Uganda reopens textile factories and produces its own clothes from its raw materials. On our side, it will be necessary to support the industrialization of the sector by massive investments and by providing the necessary infrastructures. But the West will also have to draw a line under its own addiction to “fast fashion”. »