For sale — cheap: \’Dead white men\’s clothing\’. This is an interesting article about discarded clothes from America being resold in Africa.

A young man in the Congolese jungle wears a T-shirt that pleads: \”Beam me up, Scotty.\” In a Lagos nightclub, a Nigerian ingenue models a used red negligee over a hot-pink halter top. A young Liberian fighter with an AK-47 assault rifle wears a tan bathrobe like a trench coat.

In Togo, the castoffs are called \”dead white men\’s clothing.\” Few people in that West African country believe that a living person would throw away anything this good. Consumers in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania call the used clothing mitumba, the Swahili word for bale.

So that\’s where my New Kids On the Block t-shirt went. I thought it just went to the dump when my parents threw it away.