Mami Wata

A living West African water-spirit tradition of wealth and danger

Mami Wata, Mammy Water in English-based creoles of the coast such as Krio and Naijá, is a water spirit honoured across West and Central Africa and far beyond. She appears as a mermaid, a snake, sometimes a crocodile, and as a goddess of wealth, fertility, healing, wisdom and beauty with power over the rivers and the sea. In Angola and the two Congos she is Mamba Muntu or Mami Muntu. She is venerated in many places and demonised in some Christian and Muslim communities.

Scholars trace her look to the first meetings of Africans and Europeans on the coast in the fifteenth century. An Afro-Portuguese ivory, made by an African sculptor, probably Sapi, on the coast of Sierra Leone, shows a mermaid carved for patrons as early as 1490 to 1530, and a ship's figurehead in Ijebu-Ode in Nigeria is called Mami Wata by its owners. Henry John Drewal, lead author of Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas, published by UCLA's Fowler Museum in 2008 with the exhibition of the same name, follows one image above all: a 1955 Bombay reprint of an 1880s German print of the snake charmer Nala Damajanti, which in parts of Africa overtook the mermaid. From the 1940s Hindu prints brought by Indian merchants shaped her on the Ghana-Nigeria coast, and Hanuman came to stand for her male counterpart, Papi Wata.

In 1965 and 1966 Ronald Wintrob, then director of Liberia's only psychiatric centre, found belief in Mammy Water held by the vast majority of Liberians. There she was a beautiful light-skinned woman with very long hair who lived in a mansion under the water and came ashore to comb it with a golden comb. A Vai man said that if you shout and she drops the comb, you should keep it until she grants your wish. A Kissi man said she brings money in dreams to a man who promises never to marry. Mirrors are placed at her shrines, since her vanity draws her to look at herself.

Enslaved Africans carried her across the Atlantic. Her sisters there include Lasirèn in Haiti, Santa Marta la Dominadora in the Dominican Republic, drawn from that same snake charmer print, Watra-mama in Guyana and Suriname, and in Brazil Yemanja, Mother of Waters, whose annual festival in Bahia Drewal recorded in the 1990s.