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

Diane Watt outside Abasindi’s former building in Hulme. The group’s name was inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

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.