As a student in the early 1970s, Dadzie spent a year studying in Germany, where she recalls having experienced "very in-your-face racism". On returning to Britain, she worked with the publication
African Red Family and British journal
The Black Liberator, selling copies outside
Brixton tube station. However, she found them too theoretical. active between 1978 and 1982, an umbrella group that challenged white domination of the
women's liberation movement of the time. 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. She had also met
Gail Lewis and
Gerlin Bean, members of the
Brixton Black Women's Group (BBWG). These activists, along with other members of Black women's groups in Britain such as
Olive Morris, worked together under
OWAAD. In 1985, ''
The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain'' was published by
Virago Press, having been commissioned by the publisher five years earlier in 1980. The authors, Dadzie,
Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe, relied on interviews, weaving together stories to address the experiences of Black women in Britain and the development of the UK's Black Women's Movement.
The Heart of the Race won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature. The book was reissued by
Verso (with a new foreword by the
Guardian columnist Lola Okolosie) in 2018. In a final chapter added to the new edition, Dadzie states: "In these crucial times we need to remember who we are, remember what we've come from, remember what we've achieved, and never let that be forgotten, because it gives us power, strength and vision. This is what feeds the enthusiasm and the energies of the next generation." Dadzie has written widely on curriculum development and good practice with black adult learners, and the development of anti-racist strategies with schools, colleges and youth services. In 2020, Verso published a new book by Dadzie,
A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance, which explores how enslaved women "kicked back" against slavery. As she writes: "I came to realize that studying history was like detective work. However bloodied or one-sided the evidence, it could be interrogated and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. Then as now, lying by omission was common practice, and nowhere was this more apparent than in regard to black and brown-skinned women. 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? 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. ... It is a necessary addition to discussions of the legacies of slavery in Britain."
Pluto's 2021 edition of
Black People in the British Empire by
Peter Fryer carries a foreword by Dadzie, as does the book
Hairvolution: Her Hair, Her Story, Our History, by Saskia Calliste and Zainab Raghdo (Supernova Books, 2021). Dadzie's papers are held at the
Black Cultural Archives, where they are among the most visited collections. ==Selected works==