Stella Dadzie — A Kick in the Belly- Women, Slavery and Resistance
25 published claims from this book.
- A people’s survival in struggle depends on its own cultural terms, not borrowed abstractions
- Early African revolts sought to preserve a past, not transform the West
- Enslaved people defied authorities to maintain their own burial grounds
- Enslaved pregnant women were subjected to brutal treadmill labor and floggings
- Enslaved women in Barbados toiled in the fields while heavily pregnant and nursing infants
- Enslaved women in Jamaica endured physical abuse including kicks to the pregnant belly
- Enslaved women limited their fertility to strike at the plantation system
- Enslaved women organized coordinated work stoppages and direct physical resistance
- Enslaved women preserved their humanity by clinging to traditional African practices
- Enslaved women preserved their sanity by adapting smuggled African cultural practices
- Enslaved women staged small daily acts of resistance against plantation owners
- Enslaved women transmitted cultural knowledge to ensure survival across generations
- Enslaved workers won removal of brutal overseers through collective strikes
- European accounts falsely characterized African women as brutalized victims to justify slavery
- Ex-slaves’ refusal to sell disciplined labor led Brazilians to import European workers
- Exhausted enslaved workers were beaten with whips by foremen regardless of age or sex
- Financial reparations fail to address embedded societal racism and ongoing exploitation
- Oppressed people maintained a continuous, dignified resistance throughout history
- Plantation slaves claimed a right to protest mistreatment by their masters
- Planters used enslaved humans instead of draft animals because imported labor was cheaper
- Slave rebellion in Jamaica forced British abolition from above
- Slaveholding demoralized planters while they feared their slaves
- Slavery hardened white people’s hearts to the pain of enslaved families
- Slaves responded to plantation violence through collaboration, endurance, or open terror
- White bookkeepers routinely kicked pregnant enslaved women in the belly across Jamaica