Andaiye was a Guyanese community organiser and revolutionary thinker in the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), a founder of the women’s organisation Red Thread and an executive member of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA). She was part of a generation of women asking how unpaid work in the community, with its legacies in the plantation system, could be recognised on a global scale.

The plantation system, designed and overseen by Deptford residents and regulars in the 17th century, relied on the violently enforced and unpaid work of women from African descent to generate vast profits for elite classes in Britain. Women, nonetheless, played crucial roles in holding communities together and waging everyday acts of resistance, organising escapes and rebellions. Women community organisers and activists in Lewisham today, and particularly those from African, Caribbean, and migrant backgrounds, continue in this tradition, crucially and often unrecognised, holding communities together through a ‘village ethos’. They acknowledge the continuities between histories of women’s oppression and the current ordering of social life, themselves sometimes referring to the local neighbourhood - with its gross inequalities - as ‘the plantation’. These dynamics became particularly visible during the Covid pandemic, when women, often from their own pockets, fed, supported, and held communities together in the absence of state services and often putting their own health at risk. The project invites local people to study and imagine how these legacies of colonialism, enslavement and resistance are marked in women’s lives and organising practices. How do we describe and value this work? How do we plot the histories of organisation Black women deploy in Lewisham today in relation to histories of resistance and struggle? How do we mark the presence of this invisible work in the neighbourhood?

These questions guide a study/film group whose aim is to discuss the dynamics that have and do shape women’s organising practices in Lewisham.

This group is led by Sistah Jah Sun Ray of Galaxy Radio, Joyce Jacca from Deptford People’s Heritage Museum and Dr Janna Graham from Goldsmiths University, Department of Visual Cultures. Please let us know on dphmuseum@gmail.com if you are interested in joining our bi-weekly reading and study session, beginning in November 2024.