Black feminist movements - An Interview with Stella Dadzie
How Black feminist movements of 1970s London sustained themselves.
An Interview with Stella Dadzie, by Zahra Dalilah.
“There was a sense of ‘we are a family’, the African family”
At Kinfolk Network we know that African, Afrodescendent and Black movements can be sustainable and transformational. In the research paper ‘Practicing Liberation’, urea Mouzinho noted a series of key economic practices which our peoples have been using to look after ourselves, each other and the land. In it she describes how “African, Afrodescendent and Black communities have been the custodians and architects of collective, care-oriented, regenerative and emancipatory economies”. Today, we scale it back zooming in on the African diaspora communities of 1970s London, United Kingdom. Through this case study, we explore the question - how can our economic practices sustain our social movements?
In this interview activist and auther Stella Dadzie explains how the Pan-African and Black Panther principles of self-determination and siblinghood shaped the economic norms of the Black feminist social movements she was a leader in - and what happened when funders got involved.
What did fundraising for a Black feminist movement in 1970s/80s London look like?
Firstly, I will caveat this by saying I’m going back forty, fifty years back remembering this.
Money was always needed but in a very different context. You didn’t have fund giving mechanisms in place so there was an expectation that you were self reliant. There wasn’t a great deal of money about, so we didn’t expect to spend hundreds of pounds, for example to book a room.
At OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent) the way we raised money was through charging a small membership fee which enabled us to have some kind of pot of money accessible if needed. A lot of stuff was self funded. I certainly wouldn’t have thought of putting in a claim for expenses or anything like that. We sold our newsletter, we often put money in the pot ourselves. We didn’t have huge resources and we didn’t need huge resources. If we needed money, we thought nothing of organising a jumble sale. No one ever got paid. [We probably spent, in total, about a few hundred quid a year.]
Quite often we met in people’s front rooms or in local community spaces that were available to us. Certainly OWAAD’s early meetings took place in some meeting room in Gower Street, [Central London] but how we accessed it I don’t recall. Nowadays, people expect a kind of remuneration if they rent out their space which wasn’t the case. I can’t remember ever needing a huge amount of money. For the OWAAD conferences one of the members would have negotiated a space. We used the Gresham centre for the first conference, there were members who ran a creche there. The second one was held at Tottenham Community Service Unit where I worked. Also, there was a growing expectation for the Local Authority to facilitate those kinds of spaces for us. We thought nothing in Tottenham of lobbying the council for an old school building that was no longer in use and basically they gave it to us to use as a women’s centre.
How did activists at that time sustain themselves?
Some of us were students. Back then people got grants to study. Some [of us were] starting out in our careers. I was a rookie teacher from 1974 onwards. Some of us lived on the dole. Some of us wheeled and dealed.
Poverty was there and class, unemployment and all the things that blight our communities. We were all juggling jobs, children, childcare, relationships, problems with the council, housing difficulties. Finding time to be active in and among that was as much of a challenge then as it always is. But this was at the height of the UK civil rights movement, some things you couldn’t ignore, some things needed to be dealt with.
How did people in movements relate to money?
Some of the women in Brixton Black Women’s Group were coming from a Black Panther context where self-reliance was one of the key tenets of the organisation. The idea that we need to learn to do this stuff for ourselves.
As well as the black power influence, there was also this Pan-African notion of brotherhood, sisterhood, collective caring. I’m not trying to idealise it, we did have our isms and schisms and megalomaniacs and all the things that go on. But there was a sense of we are a family, the African family. Those who didn’t have were supported wherever possible. For example if we knew a sister had difficulty raising her fare to get [to a conference or a meeting], we would pool our resources to make sure she had a ticket. There was lots of collectivity, pulling together, making sure everyone was alright.
What happened when grant funding first became available?
Post-1981, [following widespread uprisings across the UK] you had Race Equality and Women’s Equality units popping up all over the place. They all had access to a pot of money so for a period of time there was a mechanism for accessing funding for specific things. The way the funding operated led to a divide and rule scenario. You applied on the basis of your ethnicity, you applied on the basis of a very specific set of aims and objectives which were often determined by the fund giver. In a very subtle and subliminal way, you saw people have to tweak what they were doing to fit the funding criteria. The impact on our communities was a degree of divide and rule but also a whittling away of that self-reliance because you no longer felt the need to raise the funds yourself. It’s a balancing act, being totally self-reliant and not so proud or so suspicious that you don’t take money from anyone. There has to be a happy medium somewhere between those extremes.
About Stella Dadzie
Stella Dadzie is a Black feminist activist and founding member of OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent) as well as a former member of the Brixton Black Women’s group. Active in the late 1970s and 80s as part of the British Civil Rights movement, she was recently described as one of the ‘grandmothers’ of Black Feminism in the UK. She 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 ‘A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance’ released in October 2021.
