Now it was by pure chance that I listened
to Woman’s Hour today but I am glad I did, because I might otherwise have
missed the story behind the A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery &
Resistance, by Stella Dadzie.
The sleeve notes from the programme pretty
much do the trick of introducing Ms Dadzie and the book
“Stella Dadzie is a teacher, writer, artist
and education activist. In her new book, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery
& Resistance, she reveals the largely untold stories of women of African
descent who, caught up in the horrors of over 400 years of slavery, were
transported across the Atlantic to the sugar plantations of Jamaica and beyond.
Women, who Stella reveals, were central to
slave rebellions and played a vital role in developing a culture of slave
resistance and liberation across the Caribbean”.**
And listening to Ms Dadzi what struck me
was that all too often we see the slaves as victims, and lump them all
together, despite the fact that they were stolen from different places, with different
cultures, and pay only lip service to the way they fought back.
So despite the obivious fact that enslaved women
had few opportunities to record their stories they left plenty of small clues that
show they played a distinctly female role in the development of a culture of slave
resistance.
Picture; cover A Kick in the Belly: Women,
Slavery & Resistance
*A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery &
Resistance, Stella Dadzie, Verso Books ISBN: 9781788738842
**Woman's Hour, Radio 4,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p6dq
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