A Kick In The Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance

We are thrilled to welcome Stella Dadzie, in conversation with Lisa Williams, for the launch of her new book A Kick in the Belly, exploring the history & resistance of enslaved women.

Aside from Mary Prince, enslaved women in the Caribbean had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. Yet from their dusty footprints and the umpteen small clues they left for us to unravel, there’s no question that they earned their place in history. Pick any Caribbean island and you’ll find race, skin colour and rank interacting with gender in a unique and often volatile way. Moreover, the evidence points to a distinctly female role in the development of a culture of resistance by enslaved people — a role that was not just central, but dynamic. In her new book A Kick In the Belly, writer, activist & educator Stella Dadzie tells the story of how enslaved women struggled for freedom in the Caribbean.

From the coffle-line to the Great House, women found ways of fighting back. Whether responding to the horrendous conditions of plantation life, the sadistic vagaries of their captors or the ‘peculiar burdens of their sex,’ their collective sanity relied on a highly subversive adaptation of the values and cultures they smuggled with them naked from different parts of Africa. By sustaining or adapting remembered cultural practices, they ensured that the lives of people considered as chattel slaves retained both meaning and purpose. A Kick in the Belly makes clear that their subtle acts of insubordination and their conscious acts of rebellion came to undermine the very fabric and survival of West Indian slavery.

Stella Dadzie, co-author of the celebrated Heart of The Race, was a founder member of OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent) in the late 1970s as part of the British Civil Rights movement and was recently described as one of the ‘grandmothers’ of Black Feminism in the UK.

Lisa Williams is the Director of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association, and has helped develop and run the popular Black History Walking Tours of Edinburgh and educational workshops in Scottish schools. Lisa, and ECA, also run workshops and sessions on Caribbean culture with local schools.