Stella Dadzie’s book A Kick in the Belly explores the hidden ‘herstory’ of enslaved women and the central role they played in their own emancipation.
Published last year, it is both an accessible read and a fascinating insight into black women’s lived realities in the British West Indies. From their small, surreptitious acts to overt rebellion, women shared every inch of the journey from slavery to freedom.
Sign up to hear the author explain why the book is so important to our understanding of this dark chapter in Britain’s history, and its relevance to some of the key issues facing us today.
Stella Dadzie is a published writer and historian, best known for The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s lives in Britain, which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature and was re-published by Verso in 2018 as a Feminist Classic. A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance was published by Verso in October 2020.
Stella is a founder member of OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent), a national umbrella group for Black women that emerged in the late 1970s as part of the British Civil Rights movement. She was recently described as one of the ‘grandmothers’ of Black Feminism in the UK, and her personal archive in Brixton‘s Black Cultural Archives is one of the most visited by researchers and scholars. Her career as a writer, artist and education activist spans over 40 years.