27 June birthdays:
Joey Covington (born 1945, died 4 June 2013) and Grace Lee Boggs (born 1915, died 5 October 2015)
Joey Covington was a drummer and songwriter with The Fenways, The Airplane (Jefferson Airplane), Hot Tuna, Jefferson Starship, The San Francisco All Stars, and many others. I guess there are worse things than being famous for being Grace Slick’s drummer, but today’s birthday boy must be swinging his sticks up there, what with all the old rockers knockers who’ve come knocking on heaven’s door in June. You’re only as pretty as you feel inside goes a song he wrote. It’s a useful dance ditty and a reminder that reading too much bad news early in the morning doesn’t lend itself to feeling groovy at all. Too many plane crashes, current and historical. The raid on Entebbe, also known as Operation Entebbe or Operation Thunderbolt, began when Air France Flight 139 was hijacked by two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and two members of the German Revolutionary Cells shortly after departing from Athens, en route to Paris on 27 June 1976. The hijackers diverted the flight to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where they were supported by Idi Amin’s regime. A successful counter-terrorist hostage-rescue mission followed, carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Best not to dwell on how that played out, or to fret about my several friends currently travelling overseas.
Always poignant to me are the glimpses of human stories I spy in the photos of any wreckage: the ubiquitous Ghana bag of the migrant. I remember clearly the moment I realised that these bags were a metaphor for dignity and hope.
After my divorce ten years ago, I bought a flat. Built in the mid-1950s, it was an apartment block in the European style, now quite sought after in the ‘mid-century modern’ genre of interior design and décor-trend-guru circles. When the Jews fled Europe during and after World War II, such buildings popped up en masse and gave birth to suburbs like Killarney, Yeoville and Hillbrow; people had lived like this in Germany for centuries and freestanding homes were a rarity for inner-city dwellers. The apartments in my building were enormous—larger than any freestanding starter home I have seen—and the grand appointments of the era of their inception were still there: high pressed ceilings, parquet floors, glass-paned double doors between lounge and dining room and, always, the shameful evidence of our history—the side entrance to the kitchen, next to the front door, for the maid, who must never be seen but ever-present to hear the summoning bell of her employer. The servants lived on the roof, in a series of tiny square rooms along the parapet wall, with a shared cement basin and two toilet cubicles providing their ablution facilities—they were not allowed to pee in the flats downstairs. When I lived in the building, these rooftop rooms—small for one person to fit a bed and chair—housed up to six men at a time. All clandestine occupants, come from neighbouring countries to find work, or freshly out of prison and trying to find a stream back into society, and security guards, who are the new Mafia of the underworld. The security guards worked shifts, so six or eight of them would rent a room and four would sleep while the others worked and so it went, with one shift bringing greasy takeaway food in as the next ran down the stairs to catch his lift with the security firm bus that had just dropped his friend who was going to lie now in the blanket still warm from his own slumber. They would do this for six months and then disappear, home to Zimbabwe or wherever, helped by their friends into taxis bearing their enormous plaid-patterned reinforced plastic carry bags—Ghana bags—of purchases for the family back home.
Our washing lines were also up there and I looked into the open door of one of these rooms one day whilst hanging out my laundry to dry. It was a Saturday morning and there was nobody inside. It was as if no one lived there. A pile of blankets lay neatly folded on a shelf on the wall underneath which stood four plastic gallon paint drums with opaque lids, which I could see contained folded clothing. A disposable razor sat on top of one. A pair of brown safety boots stood just inside the door. That’s all. Men quite accustomed to having to make themselves invisible at a moment’s warning, eking out a miserable existence overlooking Louis Botha Avenue and the rooftops of upper Houghton and Parktown Ridge, the Rand Barons and the bastions of Colonialism and the mining booms that birthed Johannesburg.
The Ghana bags have crossed the divide and are now used by everyone; I recently saw a spread on a Pinterest of a glitzy home in New York. The couple are in showbiz. There they sat, she in high heels with red soles, and he with tortoiseshell spectacles that cost as much as a small car, on their patio suite cleverly upholstered with deconstructed Ghana bags. It’s called Ghetto Chic, I believe. So clever.
Speaking of New York, Uganda, and Ghana bags, I see there’s a new mayor in New York City, and would you believe the synchronicity of these things, the new boss in NYC is indelibly linked to Ghana AND Uganda. Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born on October 18, 1991, in Kampala, Uganda. His father is Mahmood Mamdani, an Indian expatriate and a postcolonial theorist of note, who once graced the corridors of University of Cape Town with his brilliance before being gently repelled by the bureaucracy. His post colonial studies and suggestions could have changed the trajectory of our sad CAPS education system. I personally revere his mother; she is none other than Mira Nair, the luminous director of Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay! and other cinematic masterpieces. His father gave him the middle name Kwame, in honour of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana.
As a boy, Zohran went to school in our own Mowbray for two years, which gives us South Africans a certain measure of pride and makes us utter fervent prayers he behaves better than that other temporary South African who has besmirched us somewhat with his musky residue.
Being the only son of these Wondernaut parents, we are assured that Zohran will bring intellectual zing to politics. He’s anti-Israel, which doesn’t bode well, but he speaks Spanish like a native, which will reassure many. His provenance can’t but bring a measure of calm; I read that he does yoga. He is a practicing Muslim, specifically Shia, identifying with the Twelver branch of Islam. Born into an interfaith household, Zohran publicly embraces his Muslim identity, attends Friday prayers, and speaks openly of his faith as a source of justice and grounding.
There’s no evidence that Zohran Mamdani’s parents ever met or corresponded with Grace Lee Boggs, our other birthday Wondernaut today. But their political and philosophical lineage suggests at least a shared current. Grace, along with her husband James Boggs, a Black autoworker, intellectual, and revolutionary theorist, formed one of the most remarkable political partnerships of the 20th century. Together they built a life rooted in radical humanism, grassroots mobilisation, and decades of activism from their home in Detroit.
Their work was guided not by slogans but by what Grace called “visionary organising,” a commitment to building the kind of future no one yet knew how to describe. Her political path was shaped not only by study of global and historical change but by daily participation in the slow, difficult, and grace-filled labour of transformation. In interviews, she reflected on her Asian American heritage, her experiences within the Black Power movement, and her evolving belief that movements must outgrow resistance and begin to imagine something more. This is what she called “revolution as a new beginning.”
Together, the Boggses nurtured a politics of becoming, not just overcoming.
“Look on yourself as a citizen in a kingdom of persons,” Kant wrote. “Act always as if the maxim of your action could become a universal law, always treating mankind, as much in your own person as in that of another, as an end, never as a means.”
And if today teaches us anything, it is that grace, whether in flight or in struggle, in Ghana bags or plastic drums, in shared flats or shared power, is the thing we cannot do without.
To all who’ve read this far, may your dignity be folded neatly, your hopes packed tightly, and your sabbath rest involve the blessed fusion of bagels and marsala. Shabbat Shalom.
Sources and further reading:
Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Ibram X. Kendi, “In Love and Struggle: A New Book on James and Grace Lee Boggs,” African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), November 15, 2016, https://www.aaihs.org/in-love-and-struggle-a-new-book-on-james-and-grace-lee-boggs/
＼ Get the latest news ／
