Stella Dadzie
9 November 2023
It’s difficult to answer the question of how I got involved in feminist politics, because it came about as a result of a number of things. I was already involved in some black liberation activities – I was working with a couple of publications, The Black Liberator and African Red Family, but also working in student politics as well at the time and increasingly meeting other women, though we weren’t that visible at the time, who were becoming increasingly frustrated that issues which concerned us as black women weren’t really getting on the agenda.
And that led to what is now deemed quite a famous meeting which took place at Warwick University, in 1975 I think, where originally we planned to meet to see if we could form a caucus within the African Students’ Union. But we were advised very strongly by women who were there from various African liberation groups to do our own thing.
That’s really how OWAAD came to be formed – the Organisation of Women of Africa and of African Descent, which underwent a name change to Asian and African Descent, when we realised how much crossover there was, in terms of the issues which we were all confronting.
OWAAD was very much conceived of as an umbrella group that would bring together individual black women’s groups that were springing up around the country at the time. Brixton Black Women’s Group of course was one of the first but by the mid 70s there were a number of groups all over the place, predominantly in London but elsewhere too. The idea was, if not to speak with one voice, at least to have some means of speaking with a collective voice about the issues which concerned black women.
I didn’t come to this from the Women’s Liberation Movement stable. I came to it from a black liberation background. I suppose I became increasingly aware of what women were doing generally in those embryonic days. For instance, Gerlin Bean was present at the first women’s liberation conference at Ruskin – that was very early (1970). She’s not available now – she’s seriously ill – but they’ve recently published a book about her that is well worth reading called Gerlin Bean, the Mother of the Movement, a very useful reader alongside Speak Out. And Gerlin was a founder member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group.
So Gerlin was at that Ruskin event and I think there was a growing interest in what women were saying generally but also a degree of – I wouldn’t call it alienation, but a sense that we weren’t part of that. This was partly because It was so rare for issues that concerned us to be addressed or even considered. And partly because there was a perception that it was a very white, middle class initiative that didn’t really relate to our realities.
A lot of the time in those days we were engaged in study groups and looked at key texts; we were grappling with their relevance to us and what we could learn from them – everything from Germaine Greer through to Frantz Fanon. We were grappling too with our relationship to the term feminism – some of us rejected it out of hand because of what it was associated with, and other women embraced it but wanted to qualify it and say we were black feminists, and there was a difference.
In my own personal experience I got involved with those campaigns that I thought were relevant to black women, like the Depo Provera campaign. But I was also one of the women who went to Greenham Common and worked with groups like Women Against Imperialism who were as far as I was concerned on the right page. There were some white women who absolutely got it, they got the anti-imperialist and class dimensions, but there were others who were simply focussed on issues of patriarchy and ‘our bodies, ourselves’.
I can only speak for myself but I think there were a number of black women who almost felt it was a luxury to just focus on those issues, when the police were out breaking black people’s skulls. People were getting murdered in custody, dragged onto planes and deported, all those things that were affecting our lives that weren’t being picked up on and should have been by the women’s movement. So there was a sense that they didn’t always get it, and didn’t always look at women more globally, instead of just here in the UK.
Of course as black women, we were also facing accusations from within our community that we were ‘splitting the struggle’ by organising separately, or that we were imitating white women or – all those allegations. There were also men who were very supportive and got it. It’s interesting, a woman came up to me at a meeting recently and said that one thing we don’t hear about is the abuse that women experienced within mixed organisations – the sexism and the chauvinism and the sexual abuse. If she thinks that’s an issue, she should be using her experience to raise it and explore it. I think it went on as well – but it’s all about context isn’t it – it’s very difficult to look back on 30, 40, 50 years ago and understand it. What was acceptable then is not what’s acceptable now. There were certain practices and behaviours that weren’t challenged because it was just seen as the way things were. Sometimes people are accused of past behaviour in a way that feels a bit unfair. I’m not making excuses for the behaviour but it is important to understand the context.
The meaning of words has changed too – the way we organised in those days was around the principle that ‘black’ was more of a catch-all phrase for anybody who experienced racism or had a history of colonialism or imperialism – which allowed us to cast our net widely. Whereas now, with the onset of identity politics, there are far more parameters around the term which probably wouldn’t have applied to us in those days. These days it’s referred to as ‘political black’, but back then it was about a shared politics rather than skin tone. But we were a little less pedantic, I think, about these terms – black was a political term in those days. And you have to remember that we had only recently reclaimed it – civil rights had allowed us to claim terms like black – say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud, young gifted and black – those songs that came out of that time fed a consciousness that people wanted to buy in to. For an Asian person to embrace the word black said something about their political identity.