Mami Wata

Across West Africa and the African diaspora, Mami Wata is the great water spirit: beautiful, wealthy, dangerous, half woman and half fish or serpent, who brings fortune or ruin and who takes her followers down into a world beneath the water where they may be given riches and returned. She is a living, widely-held tradition across many cultures from Nigeria to the Caribbean, not a single tale, and she is bound up with real rivers, lagoons and the Atlantic coast.