[1] Dadzie was born in London to a white English mother[1] and Ghanaian father, who was the first trained pilot in Ghana and after joining the RAF he flew as a navigator in missions over Belgium during the Second World War.
[1] Interviewed in 2020, Dadzie said: "We experienced poverty, homelessness and racism – my mother was ostracised as she had a black child and was a single parent.
[2][3] On returning to Britain, she worked with the publication African Red Family and British journal The Black Liberator, selling copies outside Brixton tube station.
[6] Before co-founding OWAAD, Dadzie was already a part of the Tottenham-based United Black Women's Action Group (UBWAG), where she met Martha Osamor.
[1] She has said that the seeds for the book were planted some decades earlier when she took time off from teaching to study at SOAS, University of London, working on an MA thesis that led her to focus on Jamaica and what life was like for women living on the plantation.
The records, diaries, plantation inventories, abolitionist debates, much of the primary evidence, in fact, had either been written, compiled or interpreted by white males who assumed their experience was not only central but all-embracing.
So, despite immersing myself in specialist history texts for months on end, my question continued to rankle: in over 400 years of slavery, with all of its documented horrors, what happened to the women?
[16]The TLS review of A Kick in the Belly commented that Dadzie "puts a narrative of empowerment and hope at the centre of the brutal history of slavery.