The Earth Does Not Forget What We Bury in Her

I want to tell you about a moment that changed the way I see everything. I was standing in Owino market on an ordinary Saturday morning — the kind of morning that smells of rain-damp earth and charcoal smoke — watching a trader slice open a bale of imported clothing with a small curved knife. She worked quickly, sorting garments with the efficiency of experience. This one sells. This one, maybe. This one — she tossed aside without ceremony.

I watched the reject pile grow. Then I watched two boys drag it toward the drainage channel at the edge of the market. And in that moment, something became impossible for me to ignore. I understood that the Earth was receiving something She had never asked for. And that She would not forget it.

What I Am Witnessing

Through my participation in the Tony Elumelu Foundation -IYBA WE4A Entrepreneurship Programme, I came to have a deep understanding of Green business and enviromental impact of the fashion and textile industry.

I am witnessing a slow environmental emergency hidden behind the language used to describe it. We called it donation. We called it secondhand. We called it generosity from countries with excess to countries with need. But much of what arrives in African markets today is not charity. It is disposal disguised as compassion.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, our markets have become the final destination of the fast fashion industry’s excess — the consequence of a global system that produces more clothing than the world can wear.

Millions of garments enter African ports every week, yet a significant percentage arrives already unusable: stained, torn, mouldy, or chemically saturated. Legally, these garments are classified as merchandise because they crossed a border with a price attached. Environmentally, much of it is waste from the moment it arrives.

And when I say chemically saturated, I mean it precisely. Most fast fashion today is made from synthetic fibres like polyester, nylon, and acrylic. These materials are plastic. They do not biodegrade. When burned, as they often are around informal dumping sites, they release toxic substances into the air. Their dyes and treatments frequently contain heavy metals, formaldehyde resins, and PFAS — “forever chemicals” linked to cancer, hormonal disruption, and reproductive harm.

In Europe and the United States, PFAS contamination has triggered lawsuits and policy reforms. Yet the same chemicals are entering African waterways with little accountability.

They are leaching into the Korle Lagoon in Accra. They are moving through the drainage channels around Owino into Kampala’s water systems. They are settling into soils where people grow food and raise children. No one in the supply chain that produced, sorted, shipped, and profited from these garments is being held responsible for where they end.

This is what I am witnessing: a continent absorbing the environmental consequences of another continent’s consumption. I am witnessing communities living downstream of decisions made in boardrooms they will never enter. And I am witnessing the Earth begin to show us the cost.

Microplastics are now found in human blood, breast milk, fish, and soil. Waterways near textile waste sites are increasingly contaminated. Communities that contributed the least to global overconsumption are carrying some of its heaviest environmental burdens.

The Earth does not lie. She eventually reveals everything we thought we had hidden.

What I Am Fighting For

I am fighting first for the right to name things correctly. A container ship carrying compressed textile waste across oceans should not automatically be described as generosity. Too often, it is a waste disposal system relocated onto African soil because African land has been treated as cheaper and easier to sacrifice.

I am fighting for our rivers. For the Korle Lagoon. For the drainage channels around Owino. For every waterway forced to absorb what no ecosystem was designed to carry. Water is not a waste management system. It is a living relationship between land, people, and generations not yet born.

I am also fighting for the industries we lost.Across countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania, local textile manufacturing declined under the pressure of imported secondhand clothing that undercut local production. We did not lose our textile traditions because Africans lacked creativity or skill. We lost them because the global economy made imported excess cheaper than local manufacturing.

I want African fashion rooted again in African materials, African labour, African aesthetics, and African environmental realities. And I see signs of that future already emerging. Across the continent, young entrepreneurs are building textile upcycling businesses, circular fashion platforms, natural dye enterprises, repair cultures, and fibre recovery systems.

They are proving that sustainability is not foreign to Africa. In many ways, it is a return to principles our communities have always understood: that you do not waste what the Earth provides.

I am fighting, ultimately, for sovereignty. For our relationship with this Earth to belong to us. Not as the dumping ground at the end of someone else’s supply chain, but as a living relationship between people and the land beneath them.

What Gives Me Hope

Africa is not powerless in this relationship. The global fashion industry has depended for decades on the ability to externalise its waste consequences. Once recipient countries begin questioning that arrangement, the pressure on the system becomes immediate.

But policy alone is not what gives me hope. People do. The young woman describing her upcycling business in terms of sovereignty gives me hope. The designer in Lagos building global markets around African textile traditions gives me hope. The researcher in Nairobi documenting microplastic contamination and bringing that evidence to policymakers gives me hope.

The traders, tailors, organisers, and environmental advocates trying to build alternatives from within broken systems give me hope. And strangely, the Earth Herself gives me hope. Not because She is untouched — She is visibly strained — but because ecosystems are resilient when the source of harm is reduced.Waterways recover. Soils regenerate. Land heals.

The fact that more African governments, researchers, entrepreneurs, and activists are naming what has long gone unnamed means something is shifting. We are not too late. But we are at a moment where what we choose next will matter enormously.

The message to the Earth.

If I could speak directly to the soil of Owino, to the water of the Korle Lagoon, to the air over every open textile fire, I would say this:

We see you now. We see what has been hidden beneath the language of charity and trade. We see the cost carried by rivers, by soil, by lungs, by future generations. And we are trying to deserve your patience. We did not ask to become the final destination of the world’s excess. But we can decide what happens next.

What we build in response — the policies, the circular economies, the local industries, the green enterprises, the fashion rooted in our own hands and landscapes — can become a form of accountability.

The Earth does not forget what we bury in Her. But She also remembers what we plant. And we are choosing, now, what to plant.