*Smelling Authentic*, Gikomba Market

It’s my third time being in the #GikombaMarket – the largest secondhand clothing & accessory marketplace in East Africa that offers an astonishing range of quality merchandise for traders from all adjacent African countries and counties as well as individual consumers to treasure hunt. Still half-awake, we arrive at 6:30am to meet Eddy, a young, energetic shoes reseller who is here every morning (6 days a week), ready to battle through the Shoes Street for the “Grade-A” sneakers against very tough competition. Here, we are overwhelmed by 1,000+ brokers selling (also hawking) all their fresh hot items unpacked from the ‘Mitumba’ (mixed secondhand shoes bales with 25 - 50 pairs in each). A wholesaler estimates that there are 360,000 pairs of shoes shipped from China & the West arriving at Gikomba Market every day. It feels surreal to tiptoe/jump/dash thru a nexus of murky paths and alleys here, but soon we get used to its rhythms, almost naturally. With Eddy as our gatekeeper this time, we exchange friendly chats with other curious sellers/brokers at ease. Watching their mundane trading practices in amazement, Paul and I constantly spot the extraordinary, e.g. two brokers using small coins scratching the “Made in China” and “size chart” labels on the shoe tongues; or a troop of teenage cleaners speed-washing countless secondhand shoes, generating soapy river floods on both sides of the street. Eddy shares something that raises our eyebrows: “I can SMELL if a shoe is from China or UK”. Do ‘Chinese feet’ smell differently from the Westerners’!? “No, it’s the different smells of the chemicals used to sanitize the shoes.”

In Africa, “authenticity” is dynamic, multi-layered and multi-scalar. Different brokers constantly renegotiate the realness and originality of their products – the sellers attach real brand labels from unwearable shoes to the counterfeit ones for re-creating “symbolic authenticity”; the customised designers who refine the flaws of used products with playful add-on designs to enhance its “aesthetic authenticity”; the “sensory authenticity”; and many more.