Gikomba Market Machakos

This guide to Gikomba Market Machakos in Nairobi is built around one gamble: bales of imported secondhand clothing arrive sealed, and traders pay for them sight unseen before a blade ever opens the plastic. It traces Kenya's roughly three-hundred-million-dollar secondhand clothing trade through the port of Mombasa, and the pecking order that leaves Africa sorting through the leftovers of a global market. Traders have a name for the rare good find buried in a bad bale, and that daily bet repeats across the tens of thousands of sellers and porters who work the market.