She co-wrote a classic, The Heart of the Race, and helped draw attention to overlooked atrocities – including racism in schools, police brutality and deaths in custody
One night in 1998 Stella Dadzie went to two celebrations. The writer, 69, best known for co-authoring the 1985 feminist classic, The Heart of the Race, first stopped at the Dorchester hotel for Maya Angelou’s 70th birthday. It was a wonderful party. “I tied my hair up and wore a very Afrocentric dress, unlike many people who’d been at the hairdresser all day and bought a special outfit, I was never that kind of person.” Later, after a quick change of shoes, and “without batting an eyelid” Dadzie was off again, this time to a “rave on the Stonebridge estate in Harlesden”.
Her ability to feel equally comfortable at both events, she thinks, encapsulates something about her. “I’ve had a life that’s involved shifting from poverty to wealth, from institutional to being out there on my own; it’s meant that it’s made me somebody who’s quite adaptable.”
