“A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance” by Stella Dadzie is a fantastic work that combines rigorous research with a beautiful pen. There is nothing in this book that I could criticise - both times I have read it, I have kept learning and unlearning. I learned about the transatlantic slave trade, and the consequences of a horror that still echoes throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. At the same time, I unlearned ideas that are often taken for granted in Europe, such as simplistic narratives about the end of slavery or the assumption that countries without plantation slavery on their own territory did not benefit from the buying and selling of enslaved people. Dadzie demonstrates that many European nations accumulated wealth through their participation in the slave trade, and that the consequences of that wealth continue to shape our world today.
Book Cover from Verso Books
What makes me recommend this book without reservation, however, is the way Dadzie brings to the fore Black women who started and led revolts, organised acts of resistance, and preserved an unwavering pride in their cultures, languages, and identities. This book is painful to read at times and deeply embarrassing for humanity at others but it deserves to be read, because the women Dadzie writes about have been rendered invisible by history in at least three different ways. First, as enslaved people, then as Black people, and finally as women.
Dadzie begins with the origins of the slave trade, always privileging Black perspectives. She does not shy away from the brutality of what the trade entailed. She introduces figures such as Ana Nzinga, Queen of Ndongo, who converted to Christianity and negotiated with the Portuguese while trying to preserve her kingdom, alongside women such as Taggeba and Yaa Asantewaa, who became formidable opponents of colonial empires. Yaa Asantewaa, in her sixties, was elected to lead an army of 5,000 during the Ashanti War of Resistance against the British.¹
In these opening chapters, Dadzie also examines attitudes in Europe. She argues that widespread illiteracy made it easier for propaganda and dehumanising narratives to flourish, allowing slavery to become socially acceptable for many who never witnessed its horrors firsthand. One of the ideas that stayed with me most is that Dadzie refuses to allow the reader to think of slavery as a distant historical episode. She repeatedly reminds us that the systems and attitudes that enabled it were built by ordinary people and justified through narratives that many accepted without question. That is one of the book's most unsettling arguments. We must remember now more than ever that literacy, education, and critical thinking are not simply academic virtues, but safeguards against manipulation and cruelty. The horrors of slavery are not merely the madness of another century; they expose something enduring about humanity's capacity for violence when power and ideology go unchallenged.
After setting the scene in Africa and Europe, Dadzie takes us across the Atlantic to Jamaica and what is now the United States. This is one of the book's most horrific sections. Without ever abandoning her historical and journalistic rigour, she fills her narrative with a humanity that makes it impossible to read every testimony with detachment. One aspect that has remained with me is her discussion of suicide as a form of resistance. Because enslaved people were regarded as property, taking their own lives could become a final act of denying their owners both labour and profit. Many also believed that death would allow them to reunite with their families. As Dadzie explains, "it was one of their greatest fears, the risk of attempted suicide, including defiant acts of mass suicide”,² alongside voluntary starvation.
Interwoven throughout this section is Dadzie's reminder that the wealth of the British Empire, and indeed of several European empires, cannot be understood without recognising the central role of slavery. The economic power of many modern nations was built through systems of kidnapping, forced labour, genocide and exploitation.
"A typical triangular voyage involved the exchange of goods exported from Britain in return for captured Africans. Proceeds from their sale in the Americas were used to purchase sugar, rum, cotton, tobacco, coffee, spices and other local produce for resale in Europe. Britons took full advantage of the many opportunities to get rich quickly. Indeed, the nation's rise to world dominance could not have occurred without the unprecedented wealth generated by the sale of African slaves and the blatant exploitation of their labour."³
For me, this is one of the book's greatest strengths. Dadzie does not present slavery as a regrettable footnote to imperial history, but as one of its economic foundations. She challenges readers to reconsider the origins of national wealth and to recognise that these historical structures continue to shape present inequalities.
After that sickening journey, Dadzie turns to life in the colonies. She also discusses European indentured servitude, particularly in Barbados. Yet, in another example of her careful historical analysis, she reminds us that racial hierarchies remained decisive. Skin colour could not and cannot be concealed, and even if white female servants were denied freedom or certain social markers of status, others, such as the title "Misses", remained reserved for women recognised as white.⁴ Throughout the book, Dadzie demonstrates that race and gender intersected to produce distinct forms of oppression.
At this point, it seems impossible for the narrative to become even darker. Yet Dadzie then examines the punishments inflicted upon enslaved people, paying particular attention to those reserved for women. Enslaved women suffered forms of violence that differed from those inflicted on men, in the sense that, on top of those that men suffered, they had others. They endured rape by their owners, forced pregnancies, and the separation of mothers from their children. I will not go into detail here because, although Dadzie never resorts to sensationalism, her writing is emotionally devastating. Instead, I want to leave space for what the second half of the title promises: resistance.
One of the most fascinating forms of resistance that Dadzie explores is birth control. Black women developed ways of refusing to bring more children into slavery. As she writes: "There is evidence that some enslaved women made a conscious decision to limit or control their own fertility. In doing so, they were exercising one of the few subjective choices available to them to strike at the very heart of the plantation system".⁵ This was possible because of the extensive botanical and medicinal knowledge many African women carried with them across the Atlantic. Dadzie notes:
"African women may have been naked on arrival, but part of the cultural 'baggage' that they brought with them to the Americas was their knowledge of preventative and curative medicines. Women played a vital role as healers and mystics in most African societies, and many would have known which plants could be used to induce a miscarriage. Despite planters' efforts to repress such practices, they continued undercover."⁶
Knowledge itself became a form of resistance. The same was true of culture, religion,and language. Plantation owners repeatedly attempted to eradicate African traditions, yet women often became their guardians. As Dadzie writes, "Women were the keepers of dress, language, hair and food preparation, singing, dancing and a multitude of other ways of expressing their sense of self and community."⁷
Something that makes the book powerful and hopeful is the way resistance is treated. Resistance is depicted as an enduring human quality; the determination to recover the freedom that is rightfully one's own. Resistance was not only armed rebellion or spectacular acts of defiance. It was also the preservation of memory, knowledge, language, and identity. Dadzie broadens our understanding of what resistance can look like, showing that survival itself could become a political act.
The ending of the book is perhaps its darkest. Dadzie argues that the exploitation of women has not disappeared, but merely changed form. Women continue to be trafficked, exploited and subjected to gender-based violence across every continent. At the same time, she challenges simplistic ideas about "underdeveloped" countries by asking readers to consider how centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and economic extraction contributed to creating many of today's global inequalities. Rather than offering easy conclusions, Dadzie leaves the reader with a broader understanding of how historical violence continues to shape the present. Her answer is not despair but knowledge, literacy, resistance, and intersectional solidarity.
I would like to finish with one of the book's final passages:
"The mothers who admonished or soothed their children with Anancy stories, and the grandmothers who passed on memories of their African past, are owed a huge debt of gratitude. They played a vital role as they moulded and reshaped the cultural traditions that would sustain their people through centuries of tyranny, so that we, their distant kin and scattered descendants, would know our own worth. Thanks to their courage and their refusal to be cowed, black and brown women have inherited a wealth of inner resources and a heritage to be proud of."⁸