I knew what this thrice-rejected clothing had gone through to get here, but somehow ''Africa'' looks much better in Africa -- the colors brighter, the shapes shapelier. A dress that moved along a Brooklyn conveyor belt like a gutted chicken becomes a dress again when it has been charcoal-ironed and hangs sunlit in a Kampala vendor's stall, and a customer holds it to her chest with all the frowning interest of a Call Again donor shopping at Bergdorf-Goodman. Some of the stock looks so good that it gets passed off as new in the fashionable shops on Kampala Road. Government ministers, bodyguards in tow, are known to buy their suits at Owino. Once in Africa, the clothes undergo a transformation like inanimate objects coming to life in a fairy tale. Human effort and human desire work the necessary magic.

My guide through Owino is a radio-talk-show host named Anne Kizza, a sophisticated woman who knows what she wants in dance wear from reading South African fashion magazines. She always goes to the same vendors, whose merchandise and prices are to her liking; while I am with her, she buys a slim lime-green dress for the equivalent of 60 cents and a black skirt for 30 cents. Price tags are still stapled to some items -- Thrift Store, $3.99, All Sales Final'' -- but just as Americans don't know what happens beyond the thrift shop, Africans don't know the origin of the stuff. Most Ugandans assume that the clothes were sold by the American owner. When I explain to a retailer named Fred Tumushabe, who specializes in men's cotton shirts, that the process starts with a piece of clothing that has been given away, he finds the whole business a monstrous injustice. ''Then why are they selling to us?'' he asks.

The big importers have their shops on Nakivubo Road, which is a hairy 10-minute walk through traffic from Owino. Trans-Americas' buyer in Kampala is a Pakistani named Hussein Ali Merchant. He is 40, with a beard and a paunch and a sad, gentle manner. A diabetic cigarette smoker, he seems to expect to die any day and extends the same good-natured fatalism to his business. ''It's a big chain,'' he says, and all the links beyond Merchant are forged on credit. ''Sometimes the people disappear, sometimes they die. Each year I'm getting the loss of at least $30,000. Last year a customer died of yellow fever. His whole body was yellow. He died in Jinja. The money is gone. Forget about it, heh-heh-heh.''

We drink tea in his dark shop among unsold bales stacked 20 feet high. Five or six years ago, when there were only a few clothing shops on Nakivubo Road, his annual profit was about $75,000. Today, with more than 50 stores, his profits are much lower. Merchant is one of Africa's rootless Asian capitalists. Before coming to Uganda in 1995, he twice lost all his money to looting soldiers in Zaire. Between disasters he went to Australia and pumped gas for three months, but he fled back to Africa before his visa expired. ''I've been sitting like this for 20 years here. In America you have to work hard, no money, things are very expensive. Here, it's easy. I want to do hard work in America? For what?'' Merchant has a frightening vision of himself squeezing price tags onto convenience store stock at midnight in Kentucky. As for Karachi, it terrifies him, and he goes back only once a year to see his family, his doctor and his tailor. ''I'm a prince here,'' he says. ''I'm a king here in Africa.''

Merchant's warehouse -- my go down,'' he calls it in local slang -- is in an industrial quarter of Kampala. On a Saturday afternoon in December, the truck carrying the Trans-Americas shipping container with Susie Bayer's T-shirt pulls in after its long drive from the port of Mombasa on the Kenyan coast. Seven customers -- wholesalers from all over Uganda -- anxiously wait along with Merchant. Among them is a heavy woman in her 40's with a flapper's bob and a look of profound disgust on her fleshy face. Her name is Proscovia Batwaula, but everyone calls her Mama Prossy. As the bales start leaving the container on the heads of young porters, Mama Prossy literally throws her weight around to claim the ones she wants. Merchant, standing back from the flurry, murmurs that a week before, she bloodied another woman's nose in a scuffle over a bale of Canadian cotton skirts.

Eric Stubin has stenciled my initials on the bale containing Susie Bayer's T-shirt. But I never imagined 540 bales coming off the truck at a frantic clip, turned at all angles on young men's heads, amid the chaos of bellowing wholesalers in the glare of the afternoon sun. Finding the T-shirt suddenly seems impossible. When I try to explain my purpose to Mama Prossy, she answers without taking her eyes off the precious merchandise leaving the truck: ''What gain will I have? Why should I accommodate you?'' She scoffs at the idea of publicity benefits in New York, and as bales disappear into wholesalers' trucks, I start getting a bit desperate.

Then Mama Prossy learns that I teach in American universities. She badly wants her son to attend one; for the first time she takes an interest in me. Moments later, more good luck. Merchant spots my bale coming off the truck, the initials ''GP'' all of 3 inches high.