This one’s quite the find, very cool Tanzanian-centric T-shirts: www.kinaklothing.com

Kina Klothing was recently launched early this July. “Kina,” is a Kiswahili word meaning “depth.” This collection almost exclusively features work inspired by popular culture and visual language of Tanzania, the homeland of founder. Every piece is an attempt to stimulate curiosity on the viewer while saying something positive about the person wearing the tee. Each design has been infused with meaning and worked to perfection. It’s not Clip Art cookie cutter stuff. This is completely original artwork. Each Kina shirt is printed on American Apparel T-shirts and by quality printers.

The Kollektion:

Uhuru Street combines street insight and “uhuru” (freedom) a concept that is central to Tanzanian creative aspiration. It is the first of a series named after various streets in Tanzania.

The next Kollektion to hit  will be Samora Avenue. Samora Ave is where, founder, Mkuki Bgoya’s father used to work. He walked up and down it every day, “I thought Samora was a very interesting character and a great leader. He led his people to fight for independence like Nyerere. There was a generation of leadership that came during the struggle for independence. The Samora Avenue collection will be different to Uhuru Street as the designs expand and encompass Africa and the Diaspora. I grew up in the Diaspora for a while and I connected with Carribeans, West Africans, and African Americans. The first collection was very much about coming home to Tanzania. The beautiful thing about these streets is that you find them all over Africa. Samora was not our leader but we have a street named after him.  All these leaders were a part of the same fraternity and the same struggle.

There was a strong sense of unity in Africa.”

This is a suspenseful portrait of the courage under fire of the military’s unrecognized heroes: technicians of  a bomb squad who volunteer to challenge the odds and save lives doing one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. Three members of the army’s elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad battle insurgent and one another as they search for and disarm a wave of roadside bombs on the streets of Baghdad-in order to try and make the city a safer place for for Iraqis and Americans alike. Their mission is clear-protect and save- but its anything but easy, as the margin of error when defusing a war-zone bomb is zero.  This thrilling and heart pounding look at the psychology of bomb technicians and the effects of risk and danger on the human psyche is a fictional tale inspired by real events journalist and screen writer Mark Boal, who have embedded with a special bomb unit in Iraq. In Iraq, it is soldier vernacular to speak of explosions as sending you to ”the hurt locker.”