[5] His Indo-Guyanese family trace their heritage back to East Indian indentured workers who had been brought to Guyana between 1838 and 1917.
[citation needed] His parents divorced while he was young and he grew up with his mother, Veronica Dabydeen, and his maternal grandparents.
[7] When he was 13 years old, he moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, a teacher then attorney David Harilal Sookram, who had migrated to Britain.
[6] Between 1982 and 1984, Dabydeen worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton, the political territory of Enoch Powell, in the West Midlands of England.
One of his major achievements, in the field of education, was to persuade the Government of China to establish and fund a Confucius Institute at the University of Guyana.
Disappearance (1993) tells the story of a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman.
In 2001, Dabydeen wrote and presented The Forgotten Colony, a BBC Radio 4 programme exploring the history of Guyana.
The Oxford Companion to Black British History, co-edited by Dabydeen with John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, appeared in 2007.