Omega Rising: the film that built a framework for Rastafari sisterhood

In her landmark 1988 film Omega Rising, the late D. Elmina Davis explored the cultural and spiritual lives of Rastafari women in Britain and Jamaica.

7 June 2023

By Aleema Gray

Omega Rising: Women in Rastafari (1988)

Today, Rastafari has come to be synonymous with defiant declarations of peace and love and the colourful iconography of reggae musicians. Yet, outside of Rastafari’s popular cultural appeal, Elmina ‘Sister D’ Davis’s documentary film Omega Rising: Women in Rastafari (1988) contributes an enduring womanist perspective. Set against the backdrop of Britain and Jamaica during the mid-1980s, the film blurs the geographical borders of Rastafari histories, centring the unheard voices of Rastafari women navigating life in and between Babylon. 

Omega Rising captures Rastafari women’s ways of knowing, living and seeing, helping us to consider the colonial afterlives of women who adopted Rastafari to strike a blow for their ancestors. Drawing on an understanding of “unity not uniformity”, we get a glimpse of a kind of Rastafari womanism based on balance; the synchronicity between feminine and masculine energies within a Godly realm. We are taken through their interior archives, understanding how and why Rastafari became an important source of liberation for women who, like Davis, arrived in Britain during a period of intergenerational crisis. 

Davis was in the best position to record and document their lived experiences. Born on 7 September 1958 in St Vincent, she arrived in England during a critical turning point in growth of the Rastafari community in Britain. By the 1970s, Rastafari became what Len Garrison described as “heirs of the Black Power sentiment” – a sentiment which naturally came with significant backlash. Before too long, the community were positioned as a West Indian mafia and blamed for collectivising an unruly cultural aesthetic that built the prototype for the formation of the Black gang. 

Yet, despite widespread backlash, the movement doubled between 1974 and 1976 to reach more than 5,000 members. It was during this time that Davis became closely associated with Rastafari, growing her locs and beginning her journey into the faith. Throughout the film, we observe the impact of the historical geographies of Britain’s expanding colonial empire on their coming of age. For many women in Britain in the 1970s, Rastafari was a righteous act of self-love. As described by Jamaican author and journalist Barbara Hannah Makeda Blake: “It was the start of a process of becoming Black that had begun as a reaction to racism.” The core appeal of Rastafari came through an enduring love for H.I.M. Haile Selassie and Empress Menen; a love that not only connected them to an ancestral realm, but one that stood as a site of liberation and repair outside of Britain’s colonial rule. 

By the 1980s, when a politics of heritage converged with a politics of race, Rastafari became re-energised in a movement of ‘organising and centralising’. The first few years of the decade embodied what Rastafari would reference as ‘bunning’ – an unruly and violent physical encounter with the state. The first 20 months saw the most cases of urban unrest since the beginning of the century. Against the backdrop of inner-city outrage, important questions were put forward: ‘what is Black heritage?’, ‘what does it mean to be a British citizen?’, and ‘how do we want to be remembered?’ 

Organising and centralising took two dimensions; on the one hand, it meant institutionalising Rastafari’s political representation. In the response, the Ethnic Minority Committee published the report entitled ‘Rastafari in the Greater London Area’ on 6 December 1982, which outlined the history, growth and recommendations for the movement as a legitimate religious community. On the other hand, the period consolidated Rastafari as socio-spiritual heritage and paved the way for a number of Rastafari-led organisations, such as the Ethiopian World Federation and Rastafari Universal Zion. 

Omega Rising: Women in Rastafari (1988)

But it was Rastafari women who were the binding force behind Rastafari mobilising. Davis found herself incorporating film as part of a radical tradition. She became a founding member of the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, one of several Black collectives set up in the 1980s with funding from Channel 4, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the BFI and the Greater London Authority. Spearheaded by Menelik Shabazz, Ceddo’s 11 members also included Milton Bryan, Imruh Bakari, Lazell Daley, Chuma Ukpadi, June Reid, Glenn Ujebe Masokonane, Vusi Challenger, Sukai Eccleston and Dada Imarogbe. Though funded through the local government, the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop was part of a movement of Black film collectives who sought to deconstruct the hegemonic voice of the state by centring the lives of those who existed on the margins of British society. 

Navigating through her own process of becoming in Babylon, Davis engaged in a deeper process of archival activism. For most Rastafari women, Omega Rising stands as a personal archive in need of protection and conservation. The film speaks a divine language that continues to affirm Rastafari women’s livity – a lived practice. In other words, it built a framework to collectivise a kind of Rastifari sisterhood through time and space.


Omega Rising screens as part of the event Religious Rights, Recognition, and the Rastafari: Omega Rising at the BFI Film on Film Festival.


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