Photo of scholar, educator, activist, and organizer, Stella Dadzie. Photo Credit: The British Library.

By Jaimee A. Swift

A historian, activist, educator, and a founding member of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD), Stella Dadzie is a revolutionary of the Black British Feminist Movement and a trailblazer of the Black radical tradition in the United Kingdom and beyond.

“Throughout history, Black women have made an equal and significant contribution to the development of our people, the richness of our various cultures, to our resistance against colonial oppression, and to our struggles for national liberation. Black women have been and we continue to be strong, resilient and courageous, despite the fact that we are the most oppressed group in any society we live in. Our race, our sex, and our low economic status have placed us at the bottom of the heap in Britain and throughout the world. It was in order to fight against this triple oppression as we experience it in Britain that OWAAD was formed.”

— OWAAD Draft Constitution, c. 1978, from the papers of Stella Dadzie, Black Cultural Archives, London, United Kingdom

When thinking of revolutionary pioneers of the Black feminist radical tradition, Stella Dadzie is most certainly a name that must be included in this political canon. Dubbed as a “one of the grandmothers of Black feminism in the United Kingdom”, Dadzie (who was born in London in 1952), is a prolific author, activist, educator, historian, and a founding member of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD), a national, socialist, and activist umbrella organization that emerged as part of the British Civil Rights Movement. Co-founded by Dadzie; radical Jamaican-British organizer, Olive Morris; and other Black women leaders in February 1978 in Coventry, OWAAD was originally formulated in response to the African Students’ Union (ASU). While Dadzie and other Black women were a part of the African Students’ Union and other activist and anti-racist organizations, many felt that due to patriarchal, male-dominated leadership, Black women’s concerns and perspectives were overlooked. Moreover, they were tired of being treated as “...minute-takers, typists, and coffee-makers but hardly ever as political and intellectual equals.”

After consulting with activists from U.K.-based organizations such as the Ethiopian Women’s Study Group, the South African Women’s Self-help Alliance, the ZANU Women’s League, and the Eritrean Women’s Study Group, Dadzie and other Black women leaders formed OWAAD as an “independent, autonomous, national, organization of Black women.” With the original name of the group being the “Organisation of Women of Africa and African Descent”, upon realizing the commonalities of the struggles between Black and Asian women living in Britain, they changed the name to the “Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent.” One of OWAAD’s major accomplishments was its first national Black women’s conference in March 1979. Held in Brixton, the conference had 300 attendees and is considered to be the inception of the Black women’s movement in the country. Many other Black women-centric activist organizations emerged from the conference like the Southall Black Sisters in North West London. However, prior to the conception of OWAAD was the Brixton Black Women’s Group, with Olive Morris as a founding member. The Group had several Black women activists like Liz Obi who were also members of the British Black Panther Movement. The Brixton Black Women’s Group was integral in establishing London’s first Black Women’s Centre and organized with AWAZ, an Asian women’s organization in London, to protest against police harassment and violence in June 1979. They also led demonstrations against “racist immigration laws and “virginity tests” against Black women at the Heathrow Airport.”

OWAAD also organized around several key issues such as domestic violence; immigration and deportation; children’s rights in schools; and anti-Black discrimination and policing. Dadzie and members of OWAAD also joined the campaign to end SUS law, which were stop and frisk laws in England and Wales that were used chronically against Black youth, who police deemed as suspicious. Moreover, OWAAD campaigned and protested for reproductive rights, particularly against the testing of Depo-Provera, a contraceptive drug, on Black, Asian, and other marginalized women. OWAAD published the newsletter, FOWAAD!

While OWAAD disbanded in 1983, Dadzie continued in her trailblazing activism. She co-authored, along with Beverley Bryan (who was also a founding member of OWAAD) and Suzanne Scafe (who was a member of OWAAD and the Brixton Black Women’s Group), The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain in 1985. The same year the book was published, it received the Martin Luther King Award for Literature. The Heart of the Race was republished by Verso Books in 2018 and deemed as a “feminist classic.”

An educator, Dadzie has written numerous essays, reports, and scholarship on anti-racist, inclusive curriculum development and strategies in education, and on challenging and addressing structural inequities in regards to access to education. She is also known for her significant contributions to combating youth racism as well working with racist perpetrators. She has traveled all over the world to help educators implement anti-racist strategies and practices in schools. Because of Dadzie’s extensive and groundbreaking work, she was awarded the Network for Black Managers (NBM) Award for Outstanding Contributions to Race Equality in Further Education in 2003. Dadzie was also a Commissioner on the Mayor’s Commission for African and Asian Heritage. Dadzie’s personal archives at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton is one of the most popular and most visited. Her forthcoming book, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance, will be released in October 2020.

Black Women Radicals spoke with Stella Dadzie about what led her into activism; advice she would give to organizers; why The Heart of Race is a classic feminist text; and what a Black Woman Radical means to her.

What led or propelled you to activism? Was it a moment, an experience, a feeling that something was wrong?

Stella Dadzie (SD): “If I think back to a particular moment in time––I suppose we are talking about the context of civil rights [and] the rise of the Black Panther movement––what was particularly interesting for me as a woman of African descent was the liberation movements in Africa, which at the time not only encompassed anti-apartheid but also liberation movements across the continent in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Angola––you name it. I certainly recall the women who were involved in those struggles were a source of inspiration for me as a young woman. I think that crystallized an experience of very in-your-face racism when I was in the middle of my degree course, where I was studying languages and had to spend a year in Germany. That was in the early seventies. I guess you could say that I went to Germany as somewhat of a young, naive Black woman and relatively apolitical and emerged from that experience as a radical Marxist with a very large afro. The feeling? I guess the feeling was accompanied by a growing feeling of outrage. The sense that something was very wrong in how Black and other dispossessed people across the world were being abused and exploited. That outrage continues until this day. It was certainly one of the things that propelled me to become an activist but I wouldn’t have called it that in those days.”

“The sense that something was very wrong in how Black and other dispossessed people across the world were being abused and exploited. That outrage continues until this day.”

What would you have called it in those days?

SD: “I am not sure. I think it was a trend. It was something a lot of people in my generation––certainly a lot of people that I knew––were pulled towards for various reasons. Certainly, I would have called it an awakening and awareness in defense of doing something more than just talk about it or analyze it. I think that came to a head because my initial involvement when I returned to Germany from Britain was with two journals. One was the African Red Family, which was a highly Marxist-Leninist publication that was directed at people in Africa who wanted to throw off their chains. The other was The Black Liberator, which was a journal produced in Britain that analyzed not just the position of Black people in the U.K., but also in other parts of the world. I was increasingly frustrated by the language of those journals, which were fairly inaccessible to most ordinary people. Also, it was easy to talk but not so easy to take action. So that dialectic between theory and practice was an issue for me. I felt, ‘Okay, well that is what’s happening. What do we do about it?’ I think that sort of feeds into the journey I ended up taking towards Black feminism and Black female activism.”

“I found myself standing out in Brixton Tube station. Brixton is a very Black community in England, in London, and feeling like, ‘What am I doing here?’ Even I, with three or four years at university, was finding it difficult to engage in the language with some of those articles. So to me, it is really important that whatever I did was based in community practice and engaged ordinary people who are the people whose lives are most affected by this shit.”

Photo of scholar, activist, and organizer, Stella Dadzie. Photo courtesy of Stella Dadzie.

May you please share how you got involved with the U.K. Black Women’s Movement? As the founding member of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African descent (OWAAD), what were challenges and successes to organizing such a formidable organization?

SD: “I think there were growing numbers of Black women––particularly in London which was my experience––who were involved in these mixed groups like the Black Panther Movement or the Black Liberation Freedom and Unity Party. There were a number of different organizations that attracted Black women but many of us felt extremely isolated and frustrated by the sense of how these issues of Black civil rights were being addressed, as the particular issues of Black women were not being engaged with. A group of us as individuals came together to meet and to discuss how we could deal with this in the context of an organization called the African Students’ Union (ASU). There were some sisters there from Zimbabwe, Eritrea, and Ethiopia and all with their own very specific experience of how Black women fared in Black liberation movements. They urged us not to become a subsidiary of anything but to set up our own thing. It was after that we initially formed the Organisation of Women of Africa and African Descent. We started to meet and I suppose you know in those days we were just working out what our standing orders were because most of us had that kind of trade union flirtation somewhere in the background and thought that is the way all organizations did it.”

“I recall an Asian sister turning up one day on a motorbike in bike leathers and saying, ‘Well, what about us?’ Of course in the U.K. context, a lot of the Asian women who were entering Britain or were being raised in Britain at that time during our generation had come from the Indian sub-continent via East Africa. So her question to us was, ‘I am African, too. What about me?’ And that––combined with the sense that what many Asian sisters were facing were, if not identical, to our own experiences but certainly came from the same source––made us rethink that name. That is how we became the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD). I guess to begin with it, it was kind of London-centric but we also had this notion we would simply be an umbrella organization to bring together the many women in their local communities who had already taken issues up at a local level. Certainly there was a need to develop something that was flexible enough to allow women to do their own thing and to remain engaged at a community level but to also develop a collective voice so they could speak out as one where that was possible. That was what motivated those of us who founded OWAAD to set that organization up. It began as an organization that would meet regularly and would organize a national conference that brought people together and also produced a newsletter that would allow local women to publicize what they were doing and offer solidarity where they wanted and needed it. It wasn’t easy. You are talking about a time where there was no internet, there were no mobile phones, and there was no state funding. I am not lamenting that––that was just the context. It was very much done on a shoestring.”

“That also repelled us because for many of us there was a frustration with women’s politics that solely focused on women’s issues. By that I mean as Black women, we did not have the luxury to ignore racism. We didn’t have the luxury to ignore the issues of class and all those other ‘isms’ that affected us in our diverse ways.”

“Looking back––and I don’t know if you have ever been to the Black Cultural Archive in Brixton but that is where most of my papers are deposited––but looking back at some of that stuff, it was very, very amateurish [Laughs]. At the time, it was what people did. We didn’t put our names to it. We came from a school of thought that said it was the collective endeavor that matters and individuals and individualism had no place in that. I guess the challenge was to develop something that did allow us to focus on the commonalities we did have as African women and women of African descent with other colonized women. Also, to keep a very close eye on not just only what was happening in Britain but what was happening in our country of origins and to make the links to what I suppose we would now call an anti-imperialist perspective with a very local and community way of expressing it.”

“I think there is a sense where we are all very siloed and very inclined to just focus on our own navels but what the real challenge is are building those bridges. I think this pandemic shows us, if nothing else, that we are a global village and that we need to make the links and to stop thinking that it is all about us. I suppose one of the other things that I thought worth mentioning was not just what we would call the Black Politics or the Afro-centric Politics that define many of us––and certainly myself––but also the messages we were beginning to receive from what was a predominantly white women’s movement at the time because that did attract a lot of us in terms of the certain readings that were coming out, you know? That also repelled us because for many of us there was a frustration with women’s politics that solely focused on women’s issues. By that I mean as Black women, we did not have the luxury to ignore racism. We didn’t have the luxury to ignore the issues of class and all those other ‘isms’ that affected us in our diverse ways. Certainly the women’s movement was very much about body, very much about self, and very much about seeking to gain access to existing power structures. I think you hear that expressed these days as a kind of neoliberal feminism that says if you get more women in the boardroom then everything will be fine. We know that is not true and that for the vast majority of women around the world, that is not even relevant. We are still actually struggling for food, clothing, shelter; the right to keep our genitals; the right not to be trafficked; the right to have children and raise them in a healthy context; and the right not to be gang raped in local wars. There are huge issues that continue to affect Black women that do not allow us to simply focus on the luxury of what the world would be like if it was only run by women.”

“That was going on at the same time and it most certainly influenced some of our thinking. One of the ways it was articulated in OWAAD was there was a female-friendly structure and a female-friendly way of organizing, so there was a fluidity there. There was recognition that women had to juggle childcare, jobs, careers, home, and family demands and that whatever we set up should allow for that and empower women in those situations. I think the question you asked about what were OWAAD’s successes and I think that was quite an important aspect of it. I don’t want to make it seem like it was completely rosy because it wasn’t. As anyone who has been involved in any form of activism would know, there are competing interests, there are personalities, there are mental health issues, and there are all the other range of things that you can throw into the mix. If I look back and think on what we did well, that was certainly one of them.”

I can also imagine there were people who tried to thwart your progress while organizing such a formidable organization.
SD: “Well, we did not feel formidable at the time. Don’t forget: this was the context where groups were springing forth all over the place––some which lasted, some of which were of the moment, and some of which continue to this day. At the time, we didn’t know we were making history. We were just doing what needed to be done. Certainly, there was a sense we needed to focus on our commonalities rather than our differences. There was a lot of criticism, particularly from Black men and Black male activists, who saw our activities as splitting the struggle and trying to imitate white women and all sorts of criticisms that were leveled against us at the time. I think there is a strength that comes from collective activism and collective thinking. There is a power of seeing other people like you coming together and sharing similar views. In that sense, many of us found ways to reconcile those criticisms by what we were doing––either by straddling both of the groups because some of the women who were involved in the women’s groups and the women’s centers at the time, were also actively involved in the community, as I was. I was a teacher and I was really heavily involved in education campaigns. I know there were many women in the Brixton Black Women’s Group working on things like police brutality and SUS laws, which were criminalizing many young people at the time. We were able to straddle those contradictions.”

“At the time, we didn’t know we were making history. We were just doing what needed to be done.”

It is always interesting to hear from different perspectives and cultural contexts. However, what I do find and hear throughout my interviews unfortunately are the similarities between many Black women activists having to hear from men––particularly Black men––who say Black feminism is not the route to go and discouraged it because as you said, it so-called “split the movement.”

SD: “I think history has shown that it actually enriches the movement. Where it works best is when you have supportive Black men who understand the need for women to focus on those issues and understand they need to support them because they have a mother, an aunt, a sister, or a daughter who will benefit from that struggle. It is not rocket-science and certainly the men who I remember supporting us were quite happy to run the crèche while we went ahead and organized our conference or ran the book shop so we could do other things. I think that is the practice we should remember because whatever we achieve is only successful if we bring others with us, you know?”

What advice would you give to organizers and activists today?

SD: “That is a difficult one. I think I mentioned a couple of them already, like things about trying to focus on what brings you together rather than what brings you a part. What I would call the difference between identity politics, which quite often translates to focusing on me, myself, and I and the politics of identity, which is about making common cause with people who share the same oppression and the same aspirations. I think there is a big difference. There is a danger where people will disappear down a tunnel, to put it politely, if they just focus on their own navels and with only people who share the same concerns. There are many Black women, I am sure, who share the same outrage that is happening in higher education but if you are not looking at the women who are cleaning your office or when you are at home, you have to see the links and to look at this position from one of relative privilege. Those are some generic lessons.”

“I suppose thinking about today, young people and people all over the world have privilege and access to unlimited allies and unlimited audiences. I think it goes for exploiting those connections. That ability to communicate is huge, as long as you speak clearly and succinctly and not mystify everything where others cannot understand. I think the lesson that always serves me well and is as relevant today than it has always ever been, is the importance of understanding the pound sign or the dollar sign because whatever is going on, there is always going to be economics behind it. Class is huge in our story. It is huge. Class, exploitation, and dispossession are as relevant as any other issues that we identify when we talk about intersectionality.”

You co-authored the book, The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain. Oftentimes, Black feminism and Womanism is conflated or is seen as synonymous with U.S. Black North American-based women and their politics. Why was and is this book so important to understanding the lives, politics, and perspectives of Black British women?

SD: “Well, I guess until then we had been voiceless. Certainly, many of us when we started thinking about these issues were drawn to the stuff that was coming out of the States because that was where it was seen to be happening. It is only now in Britain we are beginning to acknowledge we had our own Civil Rights Movement [Laughs]. The experience of African-American women in the U.S. certainly spoke to our experience but it didn’t speak of it. The importance of our book was to put our perspective on record. It was very much a piece of oral history, which allowed women to speak from their own experiences and standpoints rather than allow us to speak for them. When I discovered when I was in the States a few years ago, someone said to me, ‘Y’all have Black folks in England?’. There was a real ignorance about our story––from the moment of capture right through to leaving the islands in the Caribbean or indeed our countries of origin in Africa and ending up on the shores of the mother country. So it was an important piece of work in all those respects. In the context of feminism generally, there was very little and I don’t even think there was anything in the context of the U.K., that spoke to Black women’s experiences. Again, we didn’t realize it at the time but the book has become a feminist classic for that reason. That is why I think it was recently republished because as old as it is in terms of years, it still speaks to our experience today. Perhaps the only thing that has changed is the diversity of women it speaks to because back in the late seventies and early eighties when we were writing the book, you could actually identify the communities very easily to whom it was relevant. Now, we are a whole hodgepodge. There are women who are from Eastern Europe who would identify with some of these experiences we talked about. It was an important book and I don’t think much has changed, unfortunately. A lot has changed and yet some things haven’t changed at all.”

“I remember meeting Jamaica Kincaid and she was saying when she thought about that history of migration from the Caribbean, she was concerned with what happened to those who were left behind. She hadn’t given much thought up until reading the book about what happened to the women who left. Even our own very specific experience, there were huge gaps in our knowledge of what went on. I think the book speaks to that, although I am the first to acknowledge there is room for many more narratives and room for many more histories––herstories.”

Covers of the book, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. The left image is the book cover from when it was originally published in 1985. The right image is the book cover from when The Heart of the Race was republished by Verso Books in 2018. The cover artwork for both editions of the Heart of the Race are by Stella Dadzie. Photo credits: Talking Humanities and Penguin Random House.

May you please speak to any contemporary Black feminist work, organizing, and movement building in Britain that overcomes erasure of Black women’s radical politics?

SD: “One of the things that has gladdened my heart since the book was republished a couple of years ago has been the number of younger, Black women who have not only been thirsty for what the book speaks to, but also have demonstrated to us how much is going on that those women of my generation don’t see because we are not online so much, we don’t follow the blogs, we are not on Facebook, and those things where those discussions are going on. It really does please me when I come across women who are making the links; who are connecting their struggles here with what is going in Africa and other parts of the world; and who are very clear that if they don’t address issues like for example, female genital mutilation or sex trafficking or all the other exploitations that go on, their victories will be very partial. I think the danger is the more we are exposed to the Beyoncé’s and the Michelle Obama’s of the world––and I don’t want to detract anything from their achievements––but the more we are bombarded with the images of the Black women who ‘have made it’, the less we focus on those who haven’t and those who are making it very successfully in their own context but not making it in a way that speaks to the Hollywood narrative. I think leadership takes many forms and quite often the most effective leadership is the leadership that is unsung or unnamed. From our grandmothers who taught us how to think and how to deal with life, to the writers and the poets and all the others whose names aren’t up in lights but who helped to form our sense of consciousness. We are erased in many ways. I was just thinking the other day when they were banging on in London about the development of this new 4,000-bed hospital that they were going to set up in a conference center to cope with all the coronavirus patients. Well, they are going to call it the Nightingale Hospital. Okay, Florence Nightingale but why not Mary Seacole? She did just as much. That is just a very small but current example of how the national narrative ignores, overlooks, and fails to see the opportunity to be more honest about the history. We are still dealing with Black History Month and white history year.”

“We are still dealing with Black History Month and white history year.”

“We can really get distracted by what it means to have made it. I don’t know about you but I am pushing 70 now and I know that I cannot take money or fame with me. What I can take with me is the love of others; the respect of others; and the minute ways each of us manages to change and improve our world. The quicker we actually focus on things and stop worrying about how big Beyonce’s ass is or how big Michelle [Obama’s] or Oprah’s bank balance is, the sooner we are going to reach the point about getting real about what is going on in this world. Obviously, this pandemic changes everything because we don’t even know how we are going to get real anymore. Certainly for me, it doesn’t work entirely on the internet because I like to touch and hug and feel people. It is a scary moment in time for all of us. What I am feeling is fragile and concerned about what is happening right now. I think because I am a historian as well as a linguist, I do very much turn to history and the sense we are all here today because something someone did before we came. Being able to look back on that history and to be able to take inspiration from it, as well as the recent past and way back then, I think is an important way of keeping ourselves strong.”

“Certainly in the U.K. context, there are many examples of Black women who have challenged the status quo and not just in the context of trade union activism but also by taking up single issues that affected or continue to affect us. I was reading recently about how Depo-Provera keeps being used on women of African descent in Israel and it is just appalling that we have to continue to raise our voices about this issue. We have been erased but if we know our history, we know that we have been there this whole time and it is just about who has the power to determine the narrative and it always has been.”

(Left to Right) Authors Stella Dadzie, Suzanne Scafe, and Beverely Bryan from the 2018 launch of the republishing of their book, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. Photo courtesy of Stella Dadzie.

May you please discuss your work on building anti-racist strategies in schools and addressing the pervasiveness of youth racism?

SD: “I was always a teacher. Where as many women who started off in OWAAD went into politics, local government, and into other areas, I kept my feet firmly in education––initially in schools working with young offenders then with adult educators. It was always apparent to me there was invisibility in the curriculum that needed to be addressed. When I started my life as a German teacher, instead of having my German family based in a little village in Germany with 2.4 kids and a Volkswagen, I moved my lot to Namibia because that was the only country in Africa where German was spoken. I used that not only as a way to teach the language but to teach how the language had spread around the world and been used in different contexts, particularly in an anti-imperialist context. I very early on saw the potential of not only teaching history but anything with the potential to challenge that invisibility and to put our faces and our achievements into the consciousness of young people. I then went on to become a trainer of teachers, managers, and others who worked in education. That gave me, in a way, more power because my role then was to show them how to do it.”

“I think that I went freelance quite early. I decided not to work for ‘the man’ ever again in the late eighties. I said, ‘You know what? I’ve had enough of this.’ I sort of set out on my own. At the time, I thought I was going to write my books and teach once or twice a week just to keep the rent paid. I soon found myself traveling across the world and working in a range of contexts––everything from townships in South Africa and right to the streets of working class South East London, working with perpetrators of racist abuse. It gave me a huge privilege in terms of being able to join it all up and see how it works but also it gave me a chance to intervene at all those levels. Some of those projects gave rise to books that are not well-known but are out there. Books like Toolkit for Tackling Racism in School, which looked at how you can address these issues in schools or books like Blood, Sweat, and Tears, which looks at how you can work with white young people who have been raised in the context where racism is their only worldview, and right through to guidance for people who are running schools and wanting and needing to mainstream anti-racism and all the other anti-isms in everything they do.”

What does a Black Women Radical mean to you and who are Black women you admire?

SD: “A Black Woman Radical is someone who locates her struggles and her activism firmly in the context of her people and her community. I don’t mean that in a nationalistic kind of way because I do believe strongly in anti-racism. Though some of us are bleating on about ‘white people this’ and ‘white people that’, we are failing to make those connections because there are a hell of a lot of white people who suffer from the same shit. It may come out differently and we may not call it racism but we really got to look at all the other movements that have arisen in the recent years to see how much crossover there is. Having said that, we all have our own specific histories and our very specific experiences. I think it is important that we as Black women don’t make the assumption that one size fits all. By that I mean we can buy into intersectionality and we can make those links but we shouldn’t do it in a way that assumes that it all goes into a matrix and comes out the same because it does not. I think we should make the links but without being simplistic about them.”

“In terms of the women I admire, how long do you have? [Laugh] I can name in the States women like Angela Davis, who is a big inspiration to me and I met her recently. I think she is just as powerful and inspirational as she ever was. Women like Maya Angelou, who I met as a fellow author of Virago. Women like Arundhati Roy and Chimamanda Adichie––they both speak wisely. I think we should also, like I said earlier, look at Black women in history like Yaa Asantewaa, Nanny of the Maroons, Cubah Cornwallis ‘Queen of Kingston’, and all those unnamed, unsung women who have made their mark in history and who made it possible for us to see ourselves in the way we do.”

For more information about the work of Stella Dadzie, please visit here.

To learn more about OWAAD and the Black Women’s Movement in Britain, please visit here.

On The Power of Stella Dadzie: A Radical Pioneer of the Black Women's Movement in Britain