Liberating Histories - Black British Feminism

00:00:00.000 You know, it's just quite shocking how 30, 40 years on we're still dealing with the same issues.

00:00:12.000 I feel like the dialogue between publications of the past and publications of the present is so important. 0.77

00:00:21.000 What makes black feminists different and unique and separate from that broader women's movement is that we didn't have the luxury of navel-gazing.

00:00:35.580 That's what I mean by outrage being present, but it also being quite a binding force for creatives of colour, to be honest, because do people want anything else from us?

00:00:51.000 Hi, I'm Victoria Bazin.

00:00:55.620 I'm Eleanor Gallus.

00:00:57.020 And I'm Mel Waters.

00:00:58.380 And this is the Liberating Histories podcast.

00:01:01.240 The podcast that explores the last 50 years of the women's movement

00:01:04.480 through the campaigns, communities, conflicts and controversies

00:01:08.560 sparked by some of its most cherished magazines.

00:01:16.380 For this episode, we're looking at the legacy of Black British feminism

00:01:20.760 in activist magazines, Past and Present.

00:01:23.860 We're chatting with Stella Dadsy of FOAD

00:01:26.400 and Kemi Alamoru of Galdem.

00:01:30.020 I hate to pick favourites, but this conversation was brilliant,

00:01:34.120 so please stay tuned.

00:01:39.240 So Stella, Stella Dadsy, was a founding member

00:01:42.300 of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Dissent,

00:01:46.560 a.k.a. OWAD, and this was formed in 1978.

00:01:50.760 The organisation had its own newsletter magazine and that was called FOAD, which ran from 1979 to 1980.

00:01:58.840 Confusing, but bear with us.

00:02:01.820 Stella was part of the collective that produced the newsletter.

00:02:05.040 Beyond that, Stella is also a lifelong activist and educator and co-author of the absolutely brilliant Heart of the Race, Black Women's Lives in Britain.

00:02:15.820 Kemi, on the other hand, worked for Galdem, an award-winning and particularly influential magazine produced by women and non-binary people of colour.

00:02:24.440 It's an amazing magazine.

00:02:26.240 If you're younger than 30, this may be the one magazine we talk about in this podcast series that you've actually heard of.

00:02:33.400 Kemi was news editor and then culture editor until the magazine folded in 2023.

00:02:39.400 She's now a freelance journalist, and as we'll hear,

00:02:42.720 she's living her best life, a very glamorous life.

00:02:46.580 She's interviewing incredible women, such as the writer Isabel Allende.

00:02:53.080 So we're bringing together these two magazine makers, Kemi and Stella,

00:02:57.240 and this gives us a chance to reframe the so-called Winter of Discontent.

00:03:02.360 The Winter of Discontent was a phrase used by Larry Lamb,

00:03:05.640 the editor of The Sun, to describe the national mood in the period between November 1978 and

00:03:12.280 February 1979. At this time, about four and a half million workers were on strike and inflation

00:03:19.040 was rife. This is also the same time FOWAD was in circulation. Of course, there have been many

00:03:27.000 comparisons between that winter of discontent in the late 70s and the wave of industrial action

00:03:32.640 and high inflation, we've been experiencing recently. And today we're looking at some of

00:03:38.160 these parallels through the prism of black British periodicals. In the 70s, the winter of discontent

00:03:45.380 was framed as a narrative of crisis by newspapers like The Sun, where the whole country was being

00:03:51.900 held to ransom by the unions. But reading FOWAD gives us a very different point of view. Instead,

00:03:59.440 as Stella argues in this interview, this period was a real time of crisis for black and Asian

00:04:05.040 people in Britain. The parallels continue if we think about Galdem, a magazine that reaches a

00:04:11.100 mass audience with the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. These are different

00:04:17.240 moments, but as we discuss, they share many uncanny similarities. So let's get into it.

00:04:29.440 So, I just wanted to start at the end, in a sense,

00:04:40.260 or with an ending, the closure of Galdem in March 2023.

00:04:45.140 And when I was looking for articles about this,

00:04:48.500 I quickly came across a photograph, and I'm going to show this to you.

00:04:52.540 I'll show it to you both. Stick it in the middle there.

00:04:55.380 I hated this photo shoot. I'm so awkward.

00:04:59.440 So you look like you're all running.

00:05:02.020 Yeah, we're running.

00:05:02.780 You're running down a long corridor.

00:05:05.500 Yeah, this is in Peckham where our first office was.

00:05:09.100 It was in Peckham Levels, which had this sort of thing that you could apply for as a small local business where you could get an office.

00:05:18.760 And like the office was the size of a car parking space.

00:05:23.140 so the whole team which at that point because this was when it was completely voluntary

00:05:27.480 the whole team would have to try and crowd in a car parking space to like have our talks before

00:05:33.900 our meetings and like decide the minutes and what we were gonna have as the agenda so yeah this is

00:05:39.140 us running through that car park uh hallway and the hallway is much bigger than any of the offices

00:05:44.720 it would have been much better just to work in the hallway but no um it's a really nice initiative

00:05:49.480 that they've got. Well it's a lovely photo you all look very happy and you're running along and

00:05:54.000 you've all got sensible shoes so you're running you know in motion hair flying it looks like you're

00:05:59.420 having fun and the caption below says that Galdem was so much more than a magazine and I think that's

00:06:05.500 really interesting and I wondered what that meant or what that means what do magazines do besides

00:06:12.020 publishing articles, images, etc? Well, I'm from Manchester, if you can tell from my accent. And

00:06:19.880 I basically needed to find my people in London. And it's not that I was ever unpopular or anything

00:06:27.620 at school. I just went to a very, very white high school. And it was clear that I was kind of like

00:06:33.680 the first black person that they met. So they'd asked me really dumb questions, like why your 0.97

00:06:38.480 palms white and I told them that my grandma was half Irish and they believed me and I just thought 0.94

00:06:42.700 oh my god there's no saving there's no saving them if they're going to take that as a real

00:06:47.720 answer do you know what I mean and like we had lovely friendships a great childhood but there

00:06:52.280 was just that little piece of my connection to my identity missing and when I moved to London

00:06:58.900 it wasn't like completely conscious but it was just like you're working through your identity

00:07:05.780 and you're thinking about things that were said to you as a teenager maybe performances that you've

00:07:10.860 subconsciously been doing and I was also trying to find my way in journalism and finding that in

00:07:17.400 the offices again like I was having to funnel my ideas through such a narrow lens and I didn't

00:07:23.500 really feel like they were interested in my ideas even though I knew that they were interesting I

00:07:28.700 know that sounds very full of myself it's like I know that what I'm saying there's a there's an

00:07:32.400 audience and an appetite for it so at the same time as it being a magazine it was also as being

00:07:39.100 able to sort of dream without limits and just like push ourselves it was a talent incubator

00:07:45.540 a friendship group a lifeline a window into a world that I'd been missing and I feel like we

00:07:51.940 all felt like a lot of hope it wasn't just a magazine it was it's kind of what I've spent

00:07:59.280 my Tony is doing basically. Brilliant thanks Kemi. Maybe we can go back to the late 1970s and think

00:08:06.360 about FOWAD and maybe think about the beginnings of FOWAD and how that emerged. You are asking me

00:08:14.080 to think back over 40 years so I'm not going to be quite as able to remember stuff as perhaps

00:08:22.220 Kemi would be, because it's more recent. I think in terms of FOAD, it probably came about

00:08:29.340 as a result of our first National Black Women's Conference in 79. It might have preceded that,

00:08:36.720 I can't be absolutely accurate, but I think it was quite common in those days for organisations

00:08:41.780 to have some kind of newsletter, some kind of mechanism for communicating with members.

00:08:47.980 and we're talking about pre-social media days

00:08:52.400 so it was quite important really

00:08:54.680 to have some way of communicating with people

00:08:57.040 and yeah, FOWAD came about out of that desire

00:09:01.620 to speak to the audience we wished to address

00:09:05.620 which was black women

00:09:07.140 Do you think it was, I mean I've described

00:09:10.120 obviously Galdem as a magazine

00:09:11.680 you've described FOWAD as more of a newsletter

00:09:14.660 but do you think it did other things

00:09:17.760 besides collect information for readers?

00:09:22.260 Well, it collected, but it also disseminated information.

00:09:26.000 And I have to keep stressing that point

00:09:28.360 that we didn't have the social media outlets

00:09:31.940 that are available to people today.

00:09:33.740 So it was either word of mouth

00:09:35.020 or something that you handed someone

00:09:37.140 that they could go away and read.

00:09:39.360 So it was definitely about disseminating information.

00:09:43.280 It was about mobilising support.

00:09:46.080 i think it was used very much by the organizations that were members of oad as a means to publicize

00:09:54.980 what they were about what they were prioritizing what they were demonstrating about and i suppose

00:10:01.400 for those of us who were producing it there was a little bit of what kemi referred to which was

00:10:06.800 you know we were meeting after hours doing some very hard work in our own time unpaid

00:10:13.260 quite often into the wee hours of the morning and that creates its own energy doesn't it it's really

00:10:19.800 interesting that you were saying that one of the best things about FOAD was mobilizing support

00:10:24.860 around causes because I think that Galdem at its best was sort of educating people on those

00:10:33.020 political discussions so you would learn about them online and then we'd maybe have a panel talk

00:10:39.740 about them in real life and then you could sort of coax people out to demonstrations as well like

00:10:45.400 we got people to go door knocking with us at one point who didn't have friends to go door knocking

00:10:50.580 this is when the labor party were actually uh something that you could mobilize to get behind

00:10:55.440 and um trying to basically like marry up the movement between social issues we were talking

00:11:02.580 about online and like actually getting people out of their house and actually get them to engage

00:11:07.300 with those political discussions in real life and I think that's kind of when you go beyond a

00:11:11.560 newsletter and beyond a magazine is when it has real life implications it's not just that you've

00:11:17.440 read it and you've put it down it's like you go and you live it it's physically changed your life

00:11:23.000 in some way that's really interesting so the connection between the magazine and activism

00:11:27.400 or the newsletter and activism going out into the into the streets doing stuff yeah this is a

00:11:33.520 related question to that. We're particularly interested in this project in how feelings are

00:11:39.540 circulated in magazines, and how those feelings then mobilise activists. Do you remember any

00:11:47.940 dominant feelings in terms of the magazine as you were producing it, or that stimulated the

00:11:54.100 magazine, or that stimulated the activism? Well, I suppose in our case, it was a generic outrage

00:12:01.540 about the position black women found themselves in the kinds of issues they were dealing with 0.71

00:12:09.040 on a day-to-day basis and the sense that we were voiceless you know we're talking about the late

00:12:15.760 70s here so there was no outlet for that it was discussions that we were familiar with because

00:12:21.920 they were the things we were talking about amongst ourselves but it wasn't necessarily the case that

00:12:27.480 the national media or anyone else was interested in those issues it was also perhaps the case that

00:12:34.500 even other black men weren't interested in the issues or other black people in our community so

00:12:40.220 there were a sense of outrage that motivated us but also that sort of collective sense of

00:12:48.100 you know we're all on the same page we all understand these issues we all want to

00:12:52.920 challenge them in some way and that in itself it's a bit like attending a demonstration isn't it

00:12:58.860 it gives you a sense of power maybe a sense rather than a real power but it's definitely

00:13:04.720 empowering to come together with other like-minded people I think that's so interesting Stella yeah

00:13:11.320 I mean that sense of outrage reflects a different mood doesn't it in the late 70s at least for black

00:13:17.360 and Asian people in Britain I guess if you think about that time period the late 70s I mean it was

00:13:22.800 referred to as the winter of discontent by the sun. But when you read FOAD, discontent doesn't

00:13:28.920 really do it, does it? Thinking about that, Kemi, was outrage important for Galdem or were there 0.54

00:13:35.140 other feelings that stimulated its success? Yeah, I feel like if you were to track when Galdem

00:13:41.940 sort of went stratospheric, for lack of better words, when Galdem really started to put down

00:13:49.120 roots. I think outrage is a really important word because it's the birth of us and also can sort of

00:13:58.520 be the death of you, if I can say so controversially. We were coming up in the age of

00:14:06.180 collectivism and, you know, really fast paced news cycles and Facebook's algorithms and Twitter's

00:14:12.800 algorithms and YouTube's algorithms were all based on what made you feel the biggest emotional

00:14:19.020 response and in lots of studies time and time again that is anger so it was pushing content

00:14:26.000 that would make you angry in order to make you engage so you can't really disentangle our rise

00:14:33.400 of virality from the feeling of outrage and it's outrage that is completely warranted but it's also

00:14:40.500 outrage that it kind of binds you almost because it's like people don't have an appetite for

00:14:47.440 you beyond outrage so if we're to you know talk about the end it's like how do you keep the

00:14:54.700 appetite for an organization that is completely supposed to be about all the nuances of the

00:15:02.380 experience of women of color and non-binary of color but how how do we get you to come to us in

00:15:07.540 times where we're not in pain like how do we get you to come to us to read about our joy our

00:15:13.260 successes our inventions what intrigues us and and in meetings we were like trying to say how do we

00:15:21.280 offer something else at different times and sometimes we did that successfully but at the

00:15:26.280 end of the day our memberships shut up during George Floyd but afterwards when people had

00:15:33.400 forgotten maybe a year later and we're posting stuff about people's new work and maybe a youth

00:15:39.440 centre that just opened up or whatever it's just like the same appetite isn't there so that's what

00:15:44.780 i mean by outrage being present but it also being quite a binding force for creatives of colour to

00:15:51.040 be honest because do people want anything else from us oh cami that's that is so interesting

00:15:57.960 do people want anything else from us that mood the the feeling of outrage or anger it's sort of

00:16:03.700 expected of you so in other words there's no room for joy or pleasure you're locked into one

00:16:09.920 specific emotion and it must be i guess it must be tiring exhausting particularly if you're

00:16:16.260 required to be switched on or plugged in 24 hours a day and and that i guess that reminds me of a

00:16:23.360 conversation we had at the activist round table when we were talking about um the new cycle the

00:16:29.520 24-hour news cycle and and you Kemi were talking about the ways in which you always had to be

00:16:36.320 switched on responsive even in the middle of the night you know you were getting responses to your

00:16:42.200 articles and were having to quickly think about the ways in which you were going to react to those

00:16:46.960 responses and I think being like 23 24 and knowing if you put something out and you get it wrong

00:16:57.320 you will know about it and you'll know about it quickly and that element of trying to protect our

00:17:02.520 writers when they had maybe said something that would ruffle feathers like I think we had one

00:17:07.800 piece where I would describe that as a bad edit job on our part where someone was talking about

00:17:15.600 Asians being expelled from Uganda so I think someone did a very standard edit job on that

00:17:23.140 to just look at spelling and grammar but the nuances even the way the headline was written

00:17:30.260 I think the headline was written as like Asians expelled from their homeland or something

00:17:37.220 and the way it was framed did not take into consideration the layers of racial

00:17:47.160 animosity between Asians in Uganda and black Ugandans and colonialism and how colonialism

00:17:55.080 had sort of placed Asians above black people in society and that had led to outrage which then

00:18:03.500 led to the expulsion and obviously that's a lot to wrap in a headline that has to be an SEO length

00:18:08.960 as well you've got to keep it real tight and real bitty and real clickable but we shouldn't have

00:18:14.220 really used the word homeland and there was something else that made it seem like black

00:18:20.600 africans were wholly responsible and wholly the problem there and kind of missed a little bit of

00:18:27.260 the nuances there in terms of like what the actual issue had been so yeah we we put that out and i 1.00

00:18:36.440 think it took about an hour for someone who was at so us to basically be like the framing of this

00:18:42.700 is awful they were like your favorite publication by women of color is at it again and it just kept

00:18:48.320 spinning out of control and you know when you've got a young writer and it's our responsibility 0.99

00:18:52.500 to sort of protect them from that because we had been through that sort of um reaction so we should

00:19:00.400 have been hot on it we should have really let the writer know to like think of a rebuttal before you

00:19:05.860 even put something out like think about the worst thing that someone could say about this and like

00:19:10.300 make sure you bake that into your piece and like we should have had sensitivity readers and we did

00:19:14.740 after that have a discussion about sending off a sensitivity reads and it's just that learning on

00:19:19.860 the job that scrappiness that you can maybe get from a zine we still had that but with the eyes

00:19:25.920 of like a hundred thousand people a week it was difficult for young writers that we'd brought in

00:19:31.800 to understand the implications of getting things wrong and I think that's why a lot of us started

00:19:37.180 shying away from opinion pieces for example because you don't want to be lampooned for

00:19:42.900 your opinion if your opinion isn't fully formed. I think you know you picked up on lots of really

00:19:48.400 interesting things there and and I was wondering about the process of producing particular articles

00:19:54.640 at FOWAD because you were talking about editorial oversight there Kemi. I mean I'm assuming there's

00:20:01.160 know in a sense oversight by one person but was there a collective oversight? Yeah I think we had

00:20:07.820 an editorial committee that would have decided what went into the next edition but I certainly

00:20:13.720 don't recall us having any concern about that level of censorship or public reaction we just

00:20:20.660 assumed our audience would get it and if there was any discussion about what went in or what

00:20:26.240 didn't go in it would probably be just about the space or the time to produce it. In terms of who

00:20:31.140 produced the articles quite often we wrote them on the back of our own discussions or what had

00:20:37.760 come into us around a particular issue but we certainly didn't have to worry about those kinds

00:20:43.500 of things it was our journal we didn't have to worry about a response because if anybody didn't

00:20:49.040 like it we could pretty much anticipate who that would be and we didn't really care about their

00:20:54.080 views and yeah we just assumed a supportive audience so that took a whole raft of anxiety

00:21:01.500 out of the process. And what's interesting there and again very different to Galdem is that a lot

00:21:09.060 of these articles were written anonymously so you don't see who writes the articles so there isn't

00:21:15.980 in a sense someone who or one person who's held accountable and there might be. I think that's an

00:21:21.760 important um observation as well and that reflects the fact that we worked as a collective

00:21:27.460 we were very clear as black women that we didn't want to emulate or reproduce male styles of 0.90

00:21:34.740 leadership there was a lot of ego involved in campaigning and a lot of male ego I can add

00:21:42.500 so I think it was an explicit ambition of ours not to reproduce that there was another side to

00:21:50.600 that as well I mentioned earlier before we started recording getting visits from MI5

00:21:57.460 special branch for my involvement in another publication and I think many of us would define

00:22:05.940 ourselves at that time as socialist feminists as Marxists who had an understanding of how easy it

00:22:12.640 is for the state to pick you off and if you think about the context that we were working in

00:22:18.720 apartheid was in its heyday we were learning lessons from struggles around the world and

00:22:25.480 one of the lessons that came out of the South African context was that often if there was an 0.53

00:22:31.460 accusation you all took a step forward so that it was impossible to pick any one of you off

00:22:37.940 and I think that's the kind of sensibility that went into the writing of the newsletter as well

00:22:43.860 as the heart of the race if you saw we anonymized all that oral history partly because it was

00:22:50.360 sensitive stuff and people didn't necessarily want their names blazoned across the page

00:22:55.820 partly I think it's cultural that sense that you don't want to wash your business in public

00:23:00.680 but also as I say it was a political conscious political attempt to ensure that people weren't

00:23:08.840 picked off I feel like the dialogue between publications of the past and publications of

00:23:17.560 the present is so important because I think everything about our current time is about

00:23:24.780 being an individual and credit is so important but with that does come intense scrutiny of

00:23:31.780 individuals and it's just so interesting that you had it anonymized and that really does make it

00:23:37.680 about the message rather than it being a star vehicle for someone who wants to make a career

00:23:42.580 out of media and I guess it's you deciding from the beginning what the purpose of the publication

00:23:48.460 is and I love Galdem but I think Galdem is slightly different things to different people

00:23:55.380 and I think nowhere was that tension more obvious than when we got money and how we got money and I

00:24:04.920 think when I listen to feminist publications of the past and I listen to other journeys what was

00:24:12.060 so interesting the first time I met you where we were having the discussion and what is so

00:24:15.720 interesting is this like feeling of yeah handling your business inside and basically being like

00:24:23.540 there's something a little bit there's something going a little bit awry here and not having the

00:24:27.800 public dialogue or the dialogue to call other people in to advise just feeling like you're the

00:24:33.500 the first person to do it or like you're in a vacuum and you're really not I think I think it

00:24:39.040 would have been so helpful to us to consider these things in a democratic way and talk about like

00:24:45.960 yeah maybe you take the names off your op-eds and and maybe if you think that something's going to

00:24:51.460 be controversial you do put it under Galdem staff we did start doing that towards the end but

00:24:56.080 I think I did that on a piece that was about I mean I'm going to give myself away now but

00:25:00.900 I did it on a piece that was about the far right, because the far right have this horrible habit of finding pieces they don't like and doxing that person, showing up at the house, calling them a monkey for like 24 hours, calling their employers.

00:25:15.080 So when it was a safeguarding issue, we were really hot on, you know, anonymizing pieces.

00:25:20.840 but I think yeah I'd love to see what a modern publication would look like

00:25:27.460 where the story is the story and the journalist isn't the story and the individuals aren't the

00:25:33.760 story because as great as that is like having followers and and you know getting opportunities

00:25:39.340 I don't know anyone of my generation who isn't in that position who isn't a little bit

00:25:44.140 tired of it as well like it is tiring it's like constant you don't you shouldn't really be the

00:25:49.800 story it raises some really I think really interesting questions about visibility and how

00:25:55.180 visible do you want to be you know or do you want to just fly under the radar there are great things

00:26:00.820 about being visible but then some problems with visibility but I'm thinking about the visual

00:26:05.480 aesthetics of both these magazines and maybe if we can think about FOWAD because Stella's done

00:26:10.780 all of the visual all of the cartoons all the visual material in FOWAD was set with Stella

00:26:16.560 All of it. Amazing.

00:26:18.360 So I was wondering, Stella, you know, why you inserted those pieces into the newsletter?

00:26:23.560 What kind of function do you think they fulfil there?

00:26:26.660 That's hard to say. I'm looking at the cartoons now and seeing stuff that I'd actually forgotten producing,

00:26:33.020 but I know I did it.

00:26:34.240 And it's interesting to me that this particular cover has just got my initials there in the corner

00:26:39.340 because I very rarely owned the stuff.

00:26:41.760 But yes, I think, you know, I think we were all aware that just reams of writing, reams of print didn't necessarily attract the kind of audience that we wanted.

00:26:53.680 I know personally having worked on Black Liberator for example that I was quite opposed to producing stuff that wasn't accessible and I was very clear that our audience for FOAD wasn't necessarily just women who'd been to university, it was women who might have had their education cut short due to, you know, whatever eventualities in their lives.

00:27:20.780 and we wanted to reach the whole broad spectrum.

00:27:25.040 So by producing cartoons that kind of conveyed the message

00:27:29.860 in a more visual way, I think that was certainly part of the motivation.

00:27:34.440 It was also to break up what would have been just endless text.

00:27:38.780 But it also brought a degree of tongue-in-cheek to the debate

00:27:43.260 and showed that although we were sort of banging on about, you know,

00:27:47.260 states actually towards immigrants and education and all these other issues that were affecting us

00:27:53.820 that we could also laugh at it and stand back from it and see it objectively and I think

00:27:59.100 that humour comes across actually when you look at the Sister Iwada cartoons they were making me

00:28:05.020 smile you know partly because they're still so current you know it's just quite shocking how

00:28:11.800 or 30, 40 years on, we're still dealing with the same issues.

00:28:16.340 Can you give us an example, Stella, of one of those cartoons?

00:28:20.380 You know, maybe just give us a little clip from it.

00:28:23.580 So there's one where Sister Awada, she's walking along the streets

00:28:29.240 and she finds a purse or a wallet on the floor

00:28:31.900 and does the right thing and goes to the police station to hand it in

00:28:35.520 and the final frame of the cartoon is her sitting in the cell

00:28:38.560 because they've arrested her for stealing it.

00:28:40.780 or there's another one where she's taking her child to the nursery and she's seeing all these

00:28:46.860 headlines on the way cuts cuts cuts cuts cuts and when she gets to the nursery door it says

00:28:51.300 the nursery has been closed due to cuts you know so that kind of you know day-to-day experience

00:28:57.720 that we had that we have to laugh about because what else can you do you either laugh you cry

00:29:02.340 and it kind of picks up on what kemi was saying earlier about not just wanting to express outrage

00:29:08.300 but actually to express joy and humour and a recognition of some of the creative outlets

00:29:14.600 or the creativity that comes out of this experience through putting in book reviews

00:29:19.400 and including poetry and so on.

00:29:21.840 I think that was all part of the project.

00:29:24.360 You've mentioned Black Liberator a few times

00:29:26.240 and I'm really interested in the relationship between FOWAD, OWAD

00:29:30.940 and the Black Panther movement, civil rights movements of the late 60s, early 70s

00:29:35.680 And maybe if you could just tell us a little bit about those connections.

00:29:39.420 Well, I think a lot of the women who came into OAD via their local women's groups, 0.99

00:29:45.660 their politics were formed in a crucible that was either the Panthers

00:29:49.160 or some kind of community response to something that needed to be mobilised around.

00:29:55.240 So women came from all kinds of backgrounds.

00:29:58.320 And we were talking earlier, weren't we, about how it sort of changes the narrative

00:30:01.960 around the British Women's Liberation Movement

00:30:04.200 when you see that actually black women quite often came to their feminism

00:30:08.080 because they were following women on the African continent

00:30:12.820 who were taking up arms in defence of their liberation

00:30:16.080 and we were idolising women like Jacina Michelle.

00:30:20.280 We weren't looking at Germaine Greer.

00:30:22.120 We were looking south for our inspiration.

00:30:25.040 We were looking at people like Claudia Jones

00:30:26.660 and other icons from our own history.

00:30:30.660 So I'm not saying that none of the women hadn't, you know,

00:30:35.220 been touched by or interested in what was happening

00:30:37.820 in terms of what we then in those days referred to

00:30:40.980 as the white women's movement. 0.97

00:30:42.640 We were very much in a minority in those spaces

00:30:45.820 and quite often an afterthought, if at all.

00:30:49.360 So there was all of that going on.

00:30:51.920 And I think, you know, our politics were formed by that 1.00

00:30:54.960 because what makes black feminists or black womanists 0.96

00:30:58.500 or whatever term we choose to identify with different and unique and separate from that 0.97

00:31:06.660 broader women's movement is that we didn't have the luxury of navel gazing we didn't have the

00:31:13.080 luxury of introspection that allowed us simply to focus on patriarchy or male chauvinism or sexual

00:31:21.780 politics and in fact it's interesting the kind of lens that people are using to understand that

00:31:28.060 through now is often translated in a way that I don't recognise you know the fact that we were

00:31:35.460 more concerned about the police cracking skulls in Brixton in 1981 than about the right of for

00:31:43.700 example some lesbian women to have a workshop at the conference that wasn't in my view homophobia

00:31:51.740 that was simply about us trying to juggle all these priorities and keep a focus on what was

00:31:57.380 concerning the majority of us which wasn't just about women and what was happening to women but

00:32:02.840 actually was what was happening to our sons and our lovers and our communities so I think

00:32:08.580 history gives you kind of 2020 hindsight on one level but sometimes it kind of clouds the lens

00:32:16.040 and I suppose it's a roundabout way of saying that you know when you look at the content of

00:32:20.840 FOAD you will see stuff that is very very specific and pertinent to women but that's certainly not

00:32:27.240 all you will see you will also see stuff about immigration law and sin bins and other issues

00:32:33.520 that are much broader than simply what we would now define as sort of a black feminist issue 1.00

00:32:40.660 you're reminding us Stella and it's really important actually that the black feminists

00:32:45.960 were organizing around a range of issues affecting their communities it was about racism and education 1.00

00:32:52.440 You know, so things like police brutality, the SUS laws, the rise of the National Front at this period.

00:32:58.840 So black women were organising collective resistance to those threats to their communities.

00:33:04.720 And I guess I want to pick up on that a little bit more.

00:33:07.540 I just want to think about that idea of resistance and how you resist.

00:33:13.200 What are the tools that you use to fight back?

00:33:15.920 To what extent are activist magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, the things that we've been talking about today,

00:33:21.300 to what extent are they lines of resistance? They certainly feed into the act of resistance

00:33:28.480 and in the sense that they raise awareness and may create a new body of supporters for particular

00:33:38.100 causes or issues or concerns they definitely are part of the process that is involved in resisting

00:33:45.600 I don't know whether they're necessary an act of resistance themselves I'd have to think about that

00:33:49.600 a little bit more certainly when you look at these journals 30 years 40 years on and you look

00:33:56.560 at the content and you look at the kinds of issues that were being addressed it is very

00:34:04.840 clear to me now that you know whether or not they were an act of resistance we're still involved in

00:34:11.260 that struggle I think there is a lot to be learned from the approaches we took even though they

00:34:18.360 weren't necessarily as self-conscious as the kind of process you've talked about, Kemi, where you're

00:34:23.820 sort of consciously monitoring your articles for sensitivity and those kinds of things that didn't

00:34:28.780 even occur to us in those days. But things like that focus on the collective rather than the

00:34:35.280 individual, the sense that what was important to us was getting a message out or attracting other

00:34:42.560 people into campaigns and and discussions that we were having that was far more important than about

00:34:49.460 who wrote it I think those are important because to some extent what you talk about Kemi you know

00:34:57.020 people the far right's response for example to some of the articles as I said I don't do social

00:35:03.400 media I've managed to survive with my profile without having a Twitter account and without

00:35:08.940 having Facebook and people look at me and go what are you crazy and it's like no I'm not

00:35:13.780 I don't want that kind of level of exposure but it's a very different world and I do

00:35:19.180 recognize that and I respect it and I'm actually in awe of young women like yourself who are

00:35:25.680 managing to juggle all that pressure on you to be commercial to be sellable to be a celebrity to be

00:35:33.700 face to be something that we never had to really bother about. I know exactly what you mean Stella

00:35:41.360 it's a very different media landscape now isn't it. Kemi can you talk to us about that a little

00:35:47.300 bit more about the relation between media and activism right now in what ways does social media

00:35:53.180 offer opportunities for activism? For my generation when you talk about activism it's a word that's

00:36:00.120 kind of been it sometimes it's lost all meaning there was a bit where i was working at dazed and

00:36:07.800 when you if you're a reader of youth culture there's such this uh trend of being a dj slash

00:36:14.920 activist a model slash activist a musician slash activist and the activism sort of begins and ends

00:36:21.220 with maybe like a nice post on instagram and you don't know whether that is activism but it can be

00:36:28.940 useful like it can be useful to package things up in an instagram post and for it to travel because

00:36:35.400 you know people might write a letter to an mp or it does raise their awareness of something but it

00:36:41.040 isn't anywhere near as dramatic as what we were talking about before of people taking up arms in

00:36:45.100 africa like there's there's definitely a spectrum of activism and i've got a friend called shante

00:36:51.260 who wrote for uh galdam who at one point tweeted i'm not an activist because with that comes like

00:36:57.840 a lot of meaning and there was just this sort of moment where it's like wait a minute we're not

00:37:03.520 activists we're just people with a point of view and that's how you know a lot of people felt

00:37:09.400 however with Galdem as a publication that is talking about anti-blackness racism and white

00:37:16.420 supremacy capitalism and you know colonialism and decolonialization like all of these things

00:37:23.240 and transphobia and all of those things you give people the tools to understand and then maybe the

00:37:31.560 tools to resist which is definitely helpful you know to begin with there was a lot more of a

00:37:39.580 radical tone of voice and a lot more of a radical point of view those radical points of views

00:37:48.760 always existed in the team but there was a bit of tension between them and like a team of people

00:37:55.880 whose job is to make money you have a magazine that gets a lot of attention you know from

00:38:02.280 the guardian weekend and the vna and then levi's is calling and gap is calling and apple is calling

00:38:09.980 and you suddenly have money and you don't want to refuse money because you think it's important for

00:38:16.400 women of color to get paid and non-binary people of color to get paid people of marginalized genders

00:38:20.240 to get paid so yeah going back to activism being something that in our generation feels like it

00:38:27.180 means less it's because everybody who becomes an activist or really visible for their activism or

00:38:34.140 their social justice ends up being seduced by brands by money and it's just like well you can't

00:38:42.820 pay your rent they're gonna pay you like a grand to do that that sort of ends up taking your

00:38:48.980 focus away or maybe softening the way you deliver your message or making your message a lot more

00:38:55.100 accessible for people in a way that over time you can see the shift in radicalism and you can see

00:39:03.180 the shift in tone and you can see the shift in priorities a little bit and also even with the

00:39:10.720 readership like obviously you start off and it is mostly young women of color non-binary people of

00:39:17.220 color reading but you get to the point where you're having virality and we were hitting like

00:39:21.900 some of Misha Fraser Carroll's pieces I just remember her regularly being able to get over

00:39:28.000 100,000 readers on those pieces and just being like wow like you've got the world looking at

00:39:34.720 what you're saying and when you get that you actually see a shift in who's reading and I

00:39:41.420 think there are a lot of white people who read Galdem to know what we were thinking but we always

00:39:46.480 had in our tone of voice that we weren't having to explain things because we were just talking to us

00:39:52.460 but then we weren't talking directly just to us anymore we were talking to everyone so it does

00:39:58.500 shift the way that you write it does shift the way that you commission none of these things are

00:40:04.020 inherently bad I just think it's really interesting to hear of a simpler time when you know who you're

00:40:11.240 talking to and you know who's gonna see it whereas with us you didn't know who was going to be reading

00:40:16.860 it on any given day. That's such an interesting insight into how the magazine works and also into

00:40:23.060 the context the circumstances of the magazine's production and consumption yeah and that business

00:40:28.700 about not knowing who your readers are anymore is so interesting you know I was kind of laughing as

00:40:34.120 you were saying that because I was reading it on the way down on the train there were things I

00:40:37.940 didn't understand yeah of course you know I'm a woman of a certain age you know it's not my culture

00:40:43.980 and a lot of the language is kind of really thrilling and rich and fantastic and lots of

00:40:49.520 the I mean I really enjoyed it it was brilliant yeah but it wasn't for me you know it's not aimed

00:40:54.660 at me and and so i think that's interesting what happens when your audience gets so big

00:40:59.560 when your readership gets so big who are you writing for and how does that change your writing

00:41:04.300 yeah do you start putting words in italics this was a conversation we had for maybe about half

00:41:09.220 an hour where you know in the guardian style guide you'll notice it now if there's a word that's

00:41:13.920 foreign or a word that is not in just contemporary english they italicize it but we were like does

00:41:22.580 that other our own readership to italicize words that they probably will understand and like those

00:41:29.440 conversations we had them so often so I'm not going to say that we completely lost our political

00:41:35.120 point of view we didn't we had conversations over the capitalization of the letter b in black and

00:41:41.860 you know having those conversations constantly and regularly and also trying to figure out like

00:41:48.660 why those things would be important and why those things might mean something to someone

00:41:53.200 we always had those conversations but it's just the time in which you can sit and absorb what's

00:42:01.880 going on what your priorities are the pressure came with a whole new set of challenges that I'm

00:42:11.740 so glad that I've been through and I think we're all glad that we've been through and I think there's

00:42:16.200 no answer to it either i think it would just be really good to have a dialogue about if someone

00:42:23.340 wants to take our torch and run with it what does that look like so we started with an ending with

00:42:31.540 gal dem ending but to what extent might we see these endings as beginnings in what ways did

00:42:37.980 these magazines newsletters start debates that have continued are you hopeful about the future of

00:42:45.380 black feminist activism? Yes I am I am bowled over sometimes by the young women I see the level of 1.00

00:42:56.140 awareness they have the engagement that they bring to the issues that still concern us I think that

00:43:04.480 is a real message of hope and certainly one of my messages that I'm constantly giving out is like

00:43:12.660 however bad things might feel at the moment we've been there we've come through worse and we live

00:43:20.280 to tell the tale and I think that's part of what we're saying as black women when we try to give

00:43:26.700 voice to these struggles that you know we're part of a continuum and you know you can go back to

00:43:34.420 women like Phyllis Wheatley who was the first black woman to publish in this country or Mary

00:43:38.920 prints and you can see how to some extent there is a thread running through right up to the present

00:43:46.460 day and yes part of it is outrage but part of it is about I have a right to speak I have something

00:43:54.160 worthy to be said and just because this white male patriarchal society we live in doesn't value my

00:44:01.680 voice doesn't make my voice any less valuable do you feel hopeful kemi i was having this is such a

00:44:10.520 name drop i was having a conversation with isabel allende for vogue and she was talking about when

00:44:17.340 she was uh working in feminist publishing in the 70s and how heartbroken she felt and not feeling

00:44:23.860 like they had done what they needed to do because it became really glossy and really commercial

00:44:28.940 and this was literally as Galdem had died and I was like wow you're really really speaking to me

00:44:35.820 because I have such conflicting feelings as to whether we did what we set out to do and I think

00:44:41.520 that's been a long part of the process is just trying to think like did we do what we needed to

00:44:47.800 do and I think because it became so big and because everybody knew what we stood for like

00:44:53.500 you only have to celebrate that I think it's mental when people come up to me and they're

00:44:59.340 like I read it every day and that happens a lot my mum teaches in schools and she'll say my

00:45:03.340 daughter did Galdem and you know girls in her class know it and like think it's really cool

00:45:09.900 and like maybe they've started their own modeling agency that's just for women of color and non-binary

00:45:14.500 people of color and it's like you cannot put a price on that and I think that is definitely

00:45:21.840 a huge achievement i think we should all be very very proud i think in terms of feeling hopeful for

00:45:28.340 the future it's how you think about keeping something and sustaining something for longer

00:45:33.420 than we sustained it eight years is really good innings because these things come quick and they

00:45:38.980 die quick from what i've read and from conversations i've had with other people who've done feminist

00:45:45.780 publications and i want there to be a feminist publication like galdam that is critical of

00:45:53.100 capitalism critical of beauty standards critical of the government and critical of like all the 0.97

00:46:00.220 things that we know are oppressing us but manage to sustain themselves but obviously to have that

00:46:05.920 longevity you feel like you need money i think the conversations that we need to have out of this

00:46:12.040 are just what the toss up is and at what point you compromise in order for the greater good to

00:46:18.500 keep something going or do you end something because it's no longer what it originally was

00:46:23.640 I think those conversations are really interesting to me and I don't think there's a clear answer

00:46:28.340 I think having a like a code of conduct or what you call the BBC charter like having a charter

00:46:34.700 to sort of like be your guiding light that when people come in and out there's still

00:46:39.000 a view of what you're supposed to be I think having those sorts of political conversations

00:46:44.320 and checking in with each other is the way to like progress the movement forward I think

00:46:49.760 burying this and just moving past and thinking like oh it was sad that we had that would be

00:46:54.560 such a real shame did I answer that well you did you did no that's absolutely brilliant and I mean

00:47:00.940 thank you for reflecting on Galdem for us and kind of working through some of that stuff it's

00:47:05.200 such an important story in itself and such an important magazine.

00:47:09.040 Thank you. Thanks very much.

00:47:10.580 I mean, we're all very proud, all very sad,

00:47:13.020 but I think something will come out of the embers of Galdem.

00:47:16.740 Absolutely. It's a great achievement.

00:47:18.560 Yeah, you should be proud.

00:47:25.160 Thank you so much, Kemi, for talking to us about Galdem

00:47:28.220 and thank you also to Stella Dadsey for talking about Forward.

00:47:35.200 Oh, Victoria, what a compelling discussion that was.

00:47:43.820 I love it when Kemi says, did I answer that well?

00:47:46.960 Yes, you answered it really well, Kemi.

00:47:49.500 Brilliant. They were both so brilliant.

00:47:51.120 You know, they were so fluent and articulate and engaging and interesting.

00:47:56.420 It's such a fantastic conversation and I love the rapport between the two of them.

00:48:00.340 And I particularly loved the moment when Stella talked about being visited by a special branch and Kemi was like, whoa, you know, that is serious stuff.

00:48:09.280 You know, you could tell that Kemi was really interested in Fouad and the work that Stella had been doing.

00:48:14.180 Yeah, those connections that you drew out across the generations were so revealing. A tension that sort of came to the surface was that tension between the way in which Fouad set itself up to publish in this non-hierarchical way and publish most of its material anonymously and collectively versus the sort of media landscape that Galdem is operating now and the immense pressure that, you know, activists, journalists, you know, like those people who've written for Galdem,

00:48:44.180 are under in terms of like having a personal brand and thinking about you know how to integrate that

00:48:49.480 personal brand into you know the more sort of activist journalism they're doing. Well I was

00:48:54.700 really interested in what Kemi had to say about the currency of activism. What is an activist in

00:49:00.980 the 21st century? Is it someone who likes a tweet or likes a Facebook post? What's this minimal

00:49:08.240 threshold for identifying as an activist because there was also very clearly a commercial dimension

00:49:15.060 at work there that it might be lucrative for certain individuals to as you say Eleanor

00:49:21.120 brand themselves as activists and this is obviously very different to the collectivist

00:49:27.940 politics that underwrites the political work that Stella's doing in the 70s and in the 80s.

00:49:33.220 And at the very end there, Kemi was raising questions, which seemed to me really pertinent, sort of looking forwards about the sorts of compromises that will always plague activist businesses, for want of a better word, like Galdem, that tension between purpose and profit and how to balance these.

00:49:50.020 And of course, you know, even the most anti-capitalist, you know, publication has to operate in a capitalist world and is subject to, you know, financial pressures and economic headwinds.

00:50:00.740 Yeah, absolutely. But I also love the way that it ended.

00:50:03.780 You know, that question about hope that I asked at the end

00:50:06.120 and Stella saying that, yes, she did have some hope.

00:50:10.440 And I think particularly the sense in which Stella

00:50:13.340 really seriously admires the work that younger black feminists are doing

00:50:17.720 and she's hopeful because of the work that they're doing. 1.00

00:50:21.620 Yeah, absolutely.

00:50:22.520 this has been liberating histories with mel waters eleanor careless and me victoria bazin

00:50:34.540 we have a fourth member of the team caitlin mendes who you've not heard on the podcast she's based

00:50:39.880 at the university of western ontario this series is part of a larger hrc funded project

00:50:45.900 based at northumbria university and partnered with the women's library lse

00:50:49.960 This podcast was produced by Sophie McNulty and Alex Watson at PIXU Productions.

00:50:56.480 You can find more about our project at liberatinghistories.org or follow us on x at libhistories or on Instagram at liberatinghistories.

00:51:09.220 You can also find links to magazine covers mentioned in our show notes as well as additional resources.

00:51:15.540 Thanks so much for listening.

00:51:19.960 You

Liberating Histories - March 15, 2024

Black British Feminism

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