Stella Dadzie Explained

Stella Dadzie
Birth Place:London, United Kingdom
Occupation:Educationalist, activist, writer and historian
Notable Works: (co-author; 1985)
A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance (2020)

Stella Dadzie (born in 1952) is a British educationalist, activist, writer and historian. She is best known for her involvement in the UK's Black Women's Movement, being a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the 1970s, and co-authoring with Suzanne Scafe and Beverley Bryan in 1985 the book . In 2020, Verso published a new book by Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance.[1]

Early life

Dadzie was born in London to a white English mother and Ghanaian father, who was the first trained pilot in Ghana and after joining the RAF he flew as a navigator in missions over Belgium during the Second World War. Dadzie was in foster care in Wales for about 18 months, before being returned to her mother at the age of four. Interviewed in 2020, Dadzie said: "We experienced poverty, homelessness and racism – my mother was ostracised as she had a black child and was a single parent. We moved around London a huge amount, as we were constantly getting thrown out by racist landlords. There was a lot of pain and suffering." Dadzie did not meet her father and siblings again until she was 12.

Activism and work

As a student in the early 1970s, Dadzie spent a year studying in Germany, where she recalls having experienced "very in-your-face racism".[2] [3] On returning to Britain, she worked with the publication African Red Family and British journal The Black Liberator, selling copies outside Brixton tube station. However, she found them too theoretical. In her twenties, she attended protests in London and Greenham Common.

She was working as a teacher when she became a founder member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD),[4] active between 1978 and 1982,[5] an umbrella group that challenged white domination of the women's liberation movement of the time.[6] Before co-founding OWAAD, Dadzie was already a part of the Tottenham-based United Black Women's Action Group (UBWAG), where she met Martha Osamor. She had also met Gail Lewis and Gerlin Bean, members of the Brixton Black Women's Group (BBWG).[7] These activists, along with other members of Black women's groups in Britain such as Olive Morris, worked together under OWAAD.[8]

In 1985, The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain was published by Virago Press, having been commissioned by the publisher five years earlier in 1980.[9] The authors, Dadzie, Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe, relied on interviews, weaving together stories to address the experiences of Black women in Britain and the development of the UK's Black Women's Movement. The Heart of the Race won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature.[10] The book was reissued by Verso (with a new foreword by the Guardian columnist Lola Okolosie) in 2018.[11] In a final chapter added to the new edition, Dadzie states: "In these crucial times we need to remember who we are, remember what we've come from, remember what we've achieved, and never let that be forgotten, because it gives us power, strength and vision. This is what feeds the enthusiasm and the energies of the next generation."[12]

Dadzie has written widely on curriculum development and good practice with black adult learners, and the development of anti-racist strategies with schools, colleges and youth services. Her poetry has been published in Tempa Tupu! Africana Women's Poetic Self-Portrait (Africa World Press, 2008), and in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby).[13]

In 2020, Verso published a new book by Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance, which explores how enslaved women "kicked back" against slavery. She has said that the seeds for the book were planted some decades earlier when she took time off from teaching to study at SOAS, University of London, working on an MA thesis that led her to focus on Jamaica and what life was like for women living on the plantation.[14] As she writes:

"I came to realize that studying history was like detective work. However bloodied or one-sided the evidence, it could be interrogated and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. Then as now, lying by omission was common practice, and nowhere was this more apparent than in regard to black and brown-skinned women. The records, diaries, plantation inventories, abolitionist debates, much of the primary evidence, in fact, had either been written, compiled or interpreted by white males who assumed their experience was not only central but all-embracing.

So, despite immersing myself in specialist history texts for months on end, my question continued to rankle: in over 400 years of slavery, with all of its documented horrors, what happened to the women?[15]

The TLS review of A Kick in the Belly commented that Dadzie "puts a narrative of empowerment and hope at the centre of the brutal history of slavery. ... It is a necessary addition to discussions of the legacies of slavery in Britain."[16]

Pluto's 2021 edition of Black People in the British Empire by Peter Fryer carries a foreword by Dadzie,[17] as does the book Hairvolution: Her Hair, Her Story, Our History, by Saskia Calliste and Zainab Raghdo (Supernova Books, 2021).[18]

Dadzie's papers are held at the Black Cultural Archives, where they are among the most visited collections.[19] [20]

Selected works

External links

Notes and References

  1. News: Sethi . Anita . Anita Sethi. Stella Dadzie: 'Women resisted slavery at every stage of the journey' . The Guardian . 21 November 2020. 21 November 2020. en.
  2. Web site: On The Power of Stella Dadzie: A Radical Pioneer of the Black Women's Movement in Britain. Jaimee A.. Swift. 2021-06-16. Black Women Radicals. 24 May 2020 . en-US.
  3. Web site: Stella Dadzie interviewed by Samenua Sesher, Respect Due, Museum of Colour Transcript. 30 March 2023.
  4. Web site: 'I Hope We Keep Sending Out Shockwaves,' Says The Grandmother of Feminism Stella Dadzie. Ella . Hopkins. Each Other. 26 October 2022. 30 March 2023.
  5. Book: Ford. Tanisha. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. 2015. UNC Press Books. 9781469625164. 154. https://books.google.com/books?id=bWG0CAAAQBAJ&q=%22stella+dadzie%22+owaad&pg=PA154. Gender Violence and Black Panther Style in 1970s London.
  6. Book: Boles, Janet K.. Diane Long Hoeveler. Historical Dictionary of Feminism. 2004. Scarecrow Press. 978-0-8108-4946-4. 247.
  7. Ohene-Nyako. Pamela. 2018-09-01. The Heart of the Race: Black women contesting British imperialism and whiteness: Third-World feminist internationalism in Britain in the 1970s-1980s. Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies. en. 21. 3. 249–264. 10.5117/TVGN2018.3.004.OHEN. 165670974 . 1388-3186.
  8. Web site: Stella Dadzie discusses OWAAD. British Library. June 2011. 14 March 2022.
  9. Book: Samantrai. Ranu. Thomas. Brooke. Literature and the Nation: Volume 14 of Yearbook of research in English and American literature. 1998. Gunter Narr Verlag. 9783823341680. The Weapons of Culture: Collective Identity and Cultural Production.
  10. Web site: Stella Dadzie - The British Library. British Library. 1 June 2016.
  11. https://www.versobooks.com/books/2694-the-heart-of-the-race "The Heart of the Race"
  12. Web site: Still The Heart of the Race, thirty years on. Sophia. Siddiqui. Institute of Race Relations. 6 September 2018. 24 November 2020.
  13. Web site: The Cluster's Gender and Diversity Office presents the Intersectionality and Critical Diversity Literacy (ICDL) Lecture / Workshop Series. Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. 24 January 2020. 23 November 2020.
  14. News: Slavery heroines. Angela. Cobbinah. Camden New Journal. 21 January 2021.
  15. Web site: The Complicated Resistance Efforts of Enslaved Women in the West Indies. Stella. Dadzie. LitHub. 20 October 2020. 30 March 2023.
  16. Web site: Refusing to be cowed: How enslaved women fought back. Meleisa . Ono-George. TLS. 30 October 2020. 20 March 2023.
  17. Web site: Black People in the British Empire by Peter Fryer Foreword by Stella Dadzie. Pluto Press. 14 March 2021.
  18. Book: Hairvolution: Her Hair, Her Story, Our History. Supernova Books. 978-1913641139. 15 September 2021.
  19. Web site: Collection Browser DADZIE - Papers of Stella Dadzie. Black Cultural Archives. 14 March 2022.
  20. Web site: A Kick In The Belly: A Conversation with Stella Dadzie. 17 February 2021. Black Women Radicals. YouTube. 14 March 2022.