Stella Dadzie - A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance

A KICK IN THE BELLY

A KICK IN THE BELLY

Women, Slavery and Resistance

Stella Dadzie

First published by Verso 2020
Stella Dadzie 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-884-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-885-9 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-886-6 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Garamond by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For Olive Morris and Sylvia Erike.
Because your spirit lives on.

Contents

Overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 15011867

Source: Yale University Press, 2010

I am greatly indebted to historians like Lucille Mathurin Mair, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, Barbara Bush, Hilary McD. Beckles, Michael Craton, Richard S. Dunn, Barry Higman, Nicole Phillip, Olive Senior, Monica Schuler, Richard Sheridan, and many others. Their pioneering work in this field paved the way for this modest attempt to explore how African women experienced and resisted slavery in the West Indies.

I have tried to acknowledge all my sources and if any were missed, it was not intentional. My aim was to bring what has been a largely academic debate into the realms of popular history, thereby making this hidden her-story accessible to a wider readership. Hopefully, in the course of time, others will fill in the inevitable gaps and omissions. With so many hidden histories yet to be unearthed, there will always be room for more narratives.

Finally, I am hugely grateful to Beverley Bryan, Heidi Mirza, Suzanne Scafe, Charlotte Ennis, to my uncle, Dr. Yankum Dadzie, and to friends and colleagues who have read and commented on the manuscript of this book as it evolved. Your feedback has enriched this effort to give voice to countless silenced women. Indeed, it is largely thanks to your support and encouragement that it has finally found its way into print.

Medaase!

Stella Dadzie, December 2019

Slavery and the Slave Trade, with its crude levelling of sexual distinctions, meant that African women shared every inch of the mans spiritual and physical odyssey.

Lucille Mathurin Mair (historian)

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.

Harriet Jacobs (African American slave)

As my two estates are at the two extremities of the island, I am entitled to say from my own knowledge that book-keepers and overseers kick black women in the belly from one end of Jamaica to the other.

Matthew Monk Lewis,
Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834)

History for the most part has been written by men, for men and thus records largely what men want to see.

Barbara Bush (historian), 1982

My history teacher rationed high marks as if in the midst of a war. This probably explains why the ten out of ten he scrawled beneath my careful little drawing of the Spinning Jenny has stuck so firmly in my memory. In 1764, Id written in my neatest handwriting, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny. It was an improvement on the spinning wheel because it could spin several balls of yarn at the same time, which meant the mills could produce more cotton. Inventions like this contributed to Britains Industrial Revolution.

Or words to that effect.

It was 1961 and I was nine years old. In those days, children were expected to quietly copy what was written on the blackboard and underline the most important words in red so we wouldnt forget them. Our teacher, a bulbous-eyed Mr Hode, renowned for his dislike of children, was in the habit of rapping you over the knuckles with a twelve-inch wooden ruler if you forgot this sacred requirement. And if your attention wandered during one of his sermon-like ramblings, his board cleaner, a vicious block of wood lined on one side with felt, would whizz past your ear, trailing a toxic cloud of chalk dust. There was no window gazing or idle doodling in his class. If you valued your playtime, you gave him your undivided attention as soon as he strode into the room.

The Toad, as he was dubbed in the playground, terrified me. Aside from his general tyranny, I was the only coloured girl in my class, which made me horribly conspicuous. Yet for some reason, I grew to love history. The bizarre antics of kings (and the occasional queen) must have captured my imagination. Plus, learning about the past, albeit about people who were long since dead, beat geography, hands down. Ghana: (capital city Accra): main exports peanuts and cocoa. Even then, young as I was, that tired old map on the wall with Britains colonial conquests marked out in pink left me cold.

Instead of battles and general mayhem, the Industrial Revolution turned out to be disappointingly bloodless. A whole lesson was devoted to the curious contraption we were instructed to copy into our exercise books. Yet there was no mention of the fact that Mr Hargreavess bold new invention relied on a continuous supply of raw cotton; not so much as a whisper about the enforced labour of millions of enslaved and brutalised Africans. The Toad kept quiet about that little piece of the jigsaw. The way he saw it, history was all about Britain and empire. He fed us a diet of glorious white conquest and, in our innocence, we swallowed it whole.

This wasnt just happening in our history classes, though the entire curriculum was biased. Words like primitive or underdeveloped slipped readily from our teachers tongues, whatever their subject. Non-white people, if not invisible, were either savage, stupid or irrelevant. The idea that anyone black or non-white might have contributed to our understanding of maths, science or literature was never even considered. Meanwhile, in music, we were encouraged to sing Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory until we knew the words by heart.

It was a good ten years before I began to understand the link between Mr Hargreavess Spinning Jenny and the slaves captured a mere stones throw from the village where my father was born. Like its wars and revolutions, Britains industrialisation had been presented as a series of unconnected events in which only powerful or infamous white men played any meaningful part. The Toad never once mentioned anyone brown or female like me, and in a world where knowledge and power were so firmly located behind the teachers desk, who was I to ask why?

It was only with the rise of the American civil rights movement and its more militant alter ego, Black Power, that my understanding of the history Id been taught began to evolve. I chanced across George Jacksons Soledad Brother