A Kick in the Belly. Stella Dadzie

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Acknowledgements

      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!¹

      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 man’s spiritual and physical odyssey.

      Lucille Mathurin Mair (historian)¹

      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)²

       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)³

Introduction: His-story, Her-story

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

      Barbara Bush (historian), 1982¹

      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’, I’d 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 Britain’s 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 wouldn’t 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 СКАЧАТЬ