Manchester's radical Black female activists: ‘We didn't define ourselves as feminists'

The Guardian

28-03-2025

The women kept their doors open through the night, providing refuge and transportation to the hospital to the frightened and injured young people. It was July 1981, and years of frustration had boiled over into uprisings across England. By the third night, police moved into the neighbourhood with a display of force unprecedented in England.
The city was the moth-eaten Manchester of the 80s, with the cotton industry that shaped it long in decline. Peaceful resistance to the constricts of Thatcher's Britain – and personal liberation – came in the form of Moss Side's Abasindi Co-operative, founded at the turn of that decade as one of the first Black women-only organisations in the UK, and the most influential in the post-industrial north.
Manchester's industrial growth owed an unacknowledged debt to transatlantic slavery, which still cast a shadow over Black Britons in the late 70s and early 80s in the shape of employment discrimination, police racism and thwarted, wasted potential.
Then, when the smoke and shouts of the uprising engulfed Moss Side, white and Black youths alike having taken to the streets to protest against police brutality, James Anderton, the city's authoritarian police chief, resorted to tactics refined by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland's Troubles. Anderton, an evangelical Christian, knew Moss Side's young Black people had been denied opportunity amid record unemployment – but was determined to restore order to the streets 'fast and hard'.
'With the uprisings, people's eyes were opened … they began to see the value of organisations such as Abasindi,' said Diane Watt, the co-author of a book on the history of Black women's activism in the UK, recalling how Abasindi's headquarters, Moss Side People's Centre, became a shelter in the storm. Police vans were driven at protesters as the state cracked down and bystanders arrested and assaulted. 'Those who were young people then, men and women now, have not forgotten us because we didn't close the door against them then,' she added.
Abasindi emerged as a distinct group from Manchester's self-help Black Women's Co-operative, which was established in the mid-70s. Among BWC founder members was Olive Morris, the Jamaican-born Black British feminist community leader and squatters' rights activist who was last year posthumously honoured with a blue plaque in Brixton, where she lived as a squatter and hosted study groups for Black women.
'However, [BWC] membership was for men and women – and, to a degree, the voices of the men were more dominant,' Watt said. 'So we felt as though we weren't being heard. And the only way for us to be heard is for us to create a space for ourselves. We weren't defining ourselves as feminist. We were seeing ourselves as Black female activists.'
The name Abasindi – Zulu for 'born to survive' – was influenced by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Men could be allies but not members. Abasindi was one Black activist group among many that fought for a better society in a radical era, but the scale of members' achievements – as a collective, as individuals and in collaboration with other groups – distinguished them.
In Manchester, the legacy of the Abasindi women is everywhere. Its poets and performers, such as Abina Likoya, SuAndi and Shirley May, have influenced countless others. Whether it is a family centre, a business park, an arts collective, an education trust, specialist NHS centre, a housing association or a commemorative plaque – if it was set up in Manchester in the 80, 90s or 00s for the benefit of the Black community, there will be an Abasindi connection.
The proceeds from arts and crafts, drumming, dancing and natural women's hairdressing allowed Abasindi to be financially self-sufficient. All were determined to reawaken pride in African cultures that had been outlawed, demeaned or diminished by the legacy of slavery.
Founders and members challenged systemic inequalities in the education system by founding supplementary schools, working to get Black students into university via access courses.
They campaigned for good-quality, affordable housing in a city where Black home-ownership rates had been devastated by so-called slum clearance programmes, which knocked down streets of terraces but did not compensate the owners enough to buy again.
Abasindi women also gave their children African names, travelled to the continent and collected oral histories for posterity, affirming a Black identity subjugated by society.
Then there was the practical work of looking after elderly people and campaigning for the NHS to recognise the devastating impact sickle cell anaemia and thalassaemia had on Black and Asian patients. They also successfully fought to prevent the deportation of domestic violence survivors whose migration status depended on abusive husbands, as Southall Black Sisters did in London, leading to a change in the law.
The founding of the Nia centre in Hulme, the first Black arts centre in Europe of its size, also involved Abasindi women. Fittingly, the civil rights activist and musician Nina Simone performed on its opening night.
Watt said: 'We were very good at making alliances – we were all about working with other organisations. When a lot of feminists wouldn't work with men, we would look for ways of working together, rather than things that divided us.'
Abasindi's influences and mentors were from the Windrush generation. Guyana's émigrés were particularly influential in the development of community organising in Manchester – the teacher Betty Luckham, the social worker Elouise Edwards, and the engineer Ron Phillips, now all deceased, were inspirational figures.
So was Louise Da-Cocodia, the first Black senior nursing officer in Manchester, having answered the call in the 1950s to leave Jamaica to work in the recently founded NHS. She was the formidable nurse in command when their headquarters became a shelter during the uprising.
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The political activist Kath Locke, a pioneering campaigner for Black history to be taught in schools and recognised in the public realm, was another local icon. Born in Blackpool in 1928, the daughter of a white mother from Lancashire and a Nigerian seaman, she was a child of Britain whose Britishness was always being questioned.
Commitment to community and dedication to the betterment of society united these activists, as did the pan-African ideology which – with Manchester having hosted the fifth Pan-African Congress, advancing decolonisation in 1945, as well as having been home to intellectuals such the St Lucian economist and Nobel laureate W Arthur Lewis – was well rooted in Manchester.
'But they couldn't have done what they did without a groundswell, the grassroots, behind them,' said Adele Jones, a co-author with Watt, about the ordinary Black women and men who have not become storied figures among historians.
For the writer and broadcaster Lemn Sissay, a former chancellor of the University of Manchester, coming into contact with the group was an act of personal emancipation, as he emerged from a repressive state-care system that had separated him from his mother and his Ethiopian heritage.
'It was at the Abasindi Co-op where I first read poetry live. I'd never been in a room with so many people of colour before … I was in awe,' he said.
'I had a broad Lancashire accent – with dreadlocks. I wasn't like anybody else who was there. At the same time, I really felt the community was saying: 'Tell us what you've been through.' That was the beginning of the rest of my life as a poet.'
For Watt, coming into contact with Black scholars and activists, through Abasindi, opened new horizons. 'When you were at school, you got told you can't,' she said. 'With that group, you were told: 'You can, and you owe it to yourself.' People like myself came out from thinking: 'I'm going to stay at being a secretary' and started going to classes and then growing and growing.
'We left that stereotype that we had inherited from society about Black people being limited, Black people not being aspiring or not able. All those things we removed from our vocabulary.'
Manchester is a city proud of its radical past. The fifth Pan-African Congress, the fight for women's suffrage, the Peterloo Massacre, the campaign for gay rights – all milestones in the mythology of a city on the right side of history, each touching, in different ways, on the lives of the women in Absasindi's orbit. But it was the persistence of injustice – in spite of that campaigning legacy – that made the group's resistance necessary, adding their names to the pantheon of the city's greatest activists.
By 2008, the group had wound down. But Jones, 45 years on from the New Year's Day meeting where Locke, Duduzile Lethlaku, Yvonne Hypolite, Maria Noble, Popgee Manderson, Madge Gordon, Abena Braithwaite and Shirley Inniss formed Abasindi, is acutely aware that the battles they fought continue.
'The transatlantic slave trade has created the conditions in which modern society still functions – the issues of race and inequality,' Jones said. 'Young people have to be aware that progress towards any form of equality is a long-term thing – you have to be in it for the long haul.'
Unsung Stories of Black Women's Activism in the UK: Spirits of Resistance and Resilience by Adele Jones and Diana Watt, is published by Springer Cham and features in the Black British book festival at Manchester Central Library on 29 March.