Stella Dadzie - Radical Black Feminist Pioneer

Stella Dadzie, Feminist Library, October 2025

When the Feminist Library announced it was hosting a launch event for Stella Dadzie’s latest book - A Whole Heap of Mix Up - I knew I had to go. There are too few opportunities to attend events showcasing the work of pioneering Black feminists - and Dadzie is right up there.

Motherland, Stella Dadzie, 1984. This painting was used as the cover for Heart of the Race.

In the mid-1980’s, at the height of Thatcher’s reign of terror, Stella Dadzie co-authored the Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, with Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe. ‘Heart of the Race’ is a radical research-based feminist text, punctuated with first person accounts - harrowing testimonies of the Black women’s experiences in healthcare, housing, work and welfare, and their relationship to the British state throughout its long history of enslavement, empire and colonialism. It is that, and the authors' commitment to feminist politics and black solidarity, of working collectively against racism and sexism, that set it apart.

It documents the reality of Black women’s lives, their mostly overlooked experiences, and importantly, their endless contributions to the social, cultural, political and economic landscapes. What makes the such a seminal and powerful publication is that connection between academic writing, lived experience and activism - it centres the stories of marginalised women to ensure they are acknowledged, remembered, and celebrated.

In the same vein as Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class, it provides the intersectional feminist analysis necessary to capture the reality, complexity, and diversity of women’s everyday lives. It also documents history that has been - and still is - largely omitted from the mainstream narrative. Over four decades later, it is shocking to note how relevant it remains.

Take the chapter about healthcare, for instance - The Uncaring Arm of the State: Black Women, Health, and the Welfare System - in which the authors elucidate Black women’s pivotal role - not only as front line staff, but in the actual inception of the health service itself.

‘…The creation of the NHS enabled the needs of capitalism to be reconciled,

albeit temporarily, with the demands of the people,

and the import of Black women’s labour was the convenient short-term means

by which this goal should be achieved…’ (p.89)

Already on its knees in the mid-1980’s, when the book was written, the NHS has been gradually hollowed out for profit. But the point here, and one that Dadzie, Bryan and Scafe make, is that the service cannot run without migrant workers - most of whom are Black women. Yet, wherever you look, the same women experience endemic health inequalities - both in terms of access to and experience of, healthcare services.

Last year, the organisation Five Times More published a report that highlighted the systemic failings in maternity care. Black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with their white counterparts. These ineqalities are replicated across the board.

Feminist Library poster

The topic also comes up in her latest book - ‘A Whole Heap of Mix Up’ - a collection of short stories, articles, speeches and poems. In particular, in ‘Angry Black Women - A Black Feminist Perspective on Mental Health & the NHS', she expands on this very familiar trope, providing important historical context to why Back women, justifiably, feel and express anger.

Healthcare is just one of many themes that crop up in her lates publications, which, as the title suggests, is a bit of hodgepodge. Most writers stick to one or two genres - not Stella Dadzie. She comfortably switches from prose to poetry, from academic to travel writing, and is at ease in her multiple identities - as an activist, academic, educator, author or painter. The book truly encapsulates a whole heap of experiences, and she shares so much of herself.

Born in London in 1952 to a white English mother and Ghanaian father, her early childhood was marked by poverty, racism and homelessness. She was raised by her (single) mum and spent time in foster care. Her dad wasn’t around. She only met him when she was 12, subsequently visiting him in France and Ghana. The social injustices she experienced shaped her to become the tireless activist and advocate for Black and Asian women.

In 1978, she co-founded of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), alongside Olive Morris  and women from the Brixton Black Women’s Group. She spent the next four years working relentlessly to challenge the white feminists who dominated the women’s liberation movement and were completely ignorant their Black and Brown sisters’ struggles.

“So unlike the women’s movement – which did focus very much on the body,

on relationships with men, and on the glass ceiling

– for us it was about the racism in schools, the incidents of police brutality,

deaths in custody, and a whole range of real life-and-death civil rights issues.

As women, many of whom had sons or brothers or partners or uncles

who were living those realities, it would have made no sense whatsoever for us simply

to focus on narrow women’s issues,

or what was seen in those days as ‘women’s issues’.”

Enter The Heart of the Race, 1985, which was dedicated to Olive Morris, who died prematurely in 1979 - after her cancer was misdiagnosed.

Stella Dadzie never stopped writing - much of her work is focused on anti-racist education. In 2020, she published A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance, about women's very distinct and diverse role in the development of a culture of slave resistance.

‘A Whole Heap of Mix Up’ is different. It’s a bit like a retrospective, a series of reflections and insights on everything from feminisms, the struggle for liberation and imperialism, but, it's also a book about her heritage, love, sisterhood and joy. And here was definitely all of that, and cake with sparklers, at the Feminist Library on the night she spoke - a wonderful celebration of an incredible kick ass feminist 💥