“She hadn’t said anything, and I had no expectation of meeting him, but somehow I knew.”ĭadzie began to spend more time with him and his family, visiting him at his home in Paris where he was a Ghanaian ambassador. “And in walked this very tall, handsome Black man and I immediately knew it was my father,” Dadzie says. One holiday, she took Dadzie to a Lyons Corner House in Westminster. The first meeting was arranged by a family friend, who had quietly maintained contact with him. I wanted to confront the injustices of the world
I was under the tutelage of people who'd been fighting for their lives. Then, at the age of 12, she finally reconnected with her father. But as one of the only Black children at the school, Dadzie became increasingly conscious of her difference. Her mother had often “played down” Dadzie’s African heritage in an attempt to navigate the racist abuse they encountered.
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“She really did encourage me to reach my full potential.” It was thanks to her that Dadzie was given a place at King Edwards school, Witley, on a scholarship for deprived London children. The headteacher, Mrs Reynolds, who she remembers had “thin, long butterfly-winged glasses and red hair” took her under her wing. She joined her mother for the holidays “wherever she happened to be”, but having the school to return to made her feel secure. “It was a turning point because, having been on the move for so much of my childhood, the school represented stability and continuity,” Dadzie says. I even spent some time in a convent”.Īt the age of eight, Dadzie was given a place at the Royal Wanstead School, a boarding school in east London. As a latch key kid, I was often looked after by somebody else while my mum worked. “We rarely stayed in the same place for more than a few months. And probably, they should have written on those cards: ‘No children’, too,” Dadzie says. “We’re talking about the era of ‘No Blacks, no dogs, no Irish. “We did sometimes end up on a park bench, but you know, we managed, we survived.”īy the age of eight Dadzie had attended at least 10 schools as she and her mother moved around London and the south coast, often because they had been evicted by racist landlords. But then I was thrown into this little bubble, where it was just my mum and me trying to survive from day to day,” she says. “I’d had this time in foster care, with brothers and sisters and the family of my foster parents. She was often a target of racist abuse, and so found it very difficult to cope.” “She was a single parent with a Black child, and in the 1950s, it wasn’t easy for her. “My mum really had a hard time,” Dadzie says. Intensifying all this was discrimination. The next few years were a difficult period for the mother and daughter, who found themselves struggling with homelessness, instability and poverty, while Dadzie also had to adjust to the contrast between rural Wales and inner-city London. She spent her early years with a Welsh miner’s family while her father completed his studies, but was returned to her mother at the age of four after a custody battle. Photograph: Courtesy of Stella Dadzieĭadzie was born in London, in 1952, to an English mother and a Ghanaian father. Stella Dadzie as a baby, with her mother.
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