I’ve been friends with Abass since Christmas, when he sold me a length of cloth with the letters ‘VIP’ printed in green bubbles. There was something very straightforward about him and especially I liked his choice of cloths, a small and interesting selection from all over west Africa, and none of the Chinese copies which now fill the Senegalese markets.

Abass is in his early twenties. Abass’s shop is little more than a narrow cubicle but shimmers with colour, the multi-coloured cloths hanging from wooden frames high above his short wooden stool. On a cassette player beside his chair, he plays Bob Marley cassettes and chats with his many customers.  Abass used to go to business school in Dakar, but dropped out because of the teachers’ strikes. “I was discouraged,” he says, with a little shrug of his shoulders. “I decided to give up.” Instead, he tells me …he went into the cloth business.  “If people believe you’re from Ivory Coast or Congo, he says, you can sell fabric at twice the price. “Me,” he said, running his hand through his wet-wave hair, “I look a bit foreign so people think my cloth is special quality.”

Abass only buys the high quality, unusual fabrics that sell for around 1,500 CFA francs (€2.30) a yard, and more than that if he can manage it. He buys his cloth from traders who come from all over west and central Africa, and what he doesn’t sell in his market stall he gives to women who act as middlemen, doing the rounds of the offices at the end of the month. These middle-women leave the cloths with the women at the offices, and then go back at the beginning of the month, when they have been paid, to collect the money. Then they give Abass his cut.  He applies a similar tactic to the men who sell the cloth in the neighbourhoods. He gives them lengths of cloth and they go around the houses selling from door to door. Sometimes, he says, the men will strike deals with clients who agree to pay for the cloth 100 francs (€0.15) a day. A length of cloth could take three months to pay off, and much more if the cloth has gone for a higher price. The salesman will go back every day, remembering in his head who owes what, and collect his money until the cloth is fully paid off.

I wonder if Abass has ever lost his money to one of the clients or middlemen. “You foreigners,” he chuckles a friendly laugh as he stands up to rearrange a bolt of cloth one of his customers has pulled down off the rack, “you believe in written contracts. But we Africans, we do everything with oral contracts. I have never lost any money this way.”

via West Africa and Other Notes. (Note- see link for original… I edited it down 😉