Mami Wata and the Water Spirits

She rises from the surf at dusk, comb in hand, her long hair streaming behind her. From the waist up she is a woman of startling beauty, dressed in silk of impossible colours; from the waist down she is a fish, or a serpent, or a pair of sinuous coils. Her name is Mami Wata — Mother Water — and across two hundred million people, from Senegal to Angola and on to Brazil, Trinidad, and Haiti, she is the most powerful and most beloved of all the spirits of the sea.

Mami Wata is not a goddess in the strict sense, nor a saint, nor an ancestor. She is a spirit — at once beautiful and dangerous, generous and jealous — and her shrines appear in fishing villages, harbour towns, and the back rooms of fortune-tellers from Lagos to Recife. Her worship is among the most enduring of all African religious traditions.

Origins of a Sea Mother

The figure that West Africans know as Mami Wata is older than any single name. The Yoruba recognise her as Yemoja, mother of fish; the Fon of Benin call her Mami Wata proper; the Igbo know her as Mami Water and the Mmuo river-spirits; the Ewe of Ghana as Mami Wata and the Tsi spirit of the lagoon. Along the Swahili coast her relatives are the jinn of the sea, the pepo of the dhow sailors, and the mermaids of the Lamu archipelago.

European contact added new layers. The iconography of the long-haired, half-fish woman came, in part, from the German and Czech prints of “Meerjungfrau” and “Melusine” that flooded the West African coast from the sixteenth century onwards. A German print of a snake-tailed goddess in a turban, mass-produced in the 1880s, is still venerated in Mami Wata shrines from Cotonou to Accra. Out of this cross-fertilisation of African water-spirits, Islamic jinn belief, and European mermaid imagery grew the Mami Wata of the modern shrine.

Her spread to the Americas came through the slave trade. Enslaved West Africans carried the figure of the water-mother across the Atlantic. In the Caribbean she became the Maman Dlo of the Suriname forests and the La Sirène of Haiti; in Brazil she merged with the Iemanjá of the Candomblé religion, who is celebrated each 31 December by white-robed worshippers on the beaches of Salvador and Rio. The Atlantic became a single spiritual ocean, and Mami Wata its most travelled queen.

The Iconography of the Shrine

A Mami Wata shrine is one of the most recognisable ritual sites in Africa. At its centre stands a framed picture or carved figure of the spirit, almost always in the imported “Pola Siegel” style of the European mermaid print: a woman in a turban, her lower body coiled in a fish-tail, holding a mirror in one hand and a comb in the other. The mirror is the most important object. It is the surface of the sea, and in it the supplicant sees the face of their own desire. The comb is the bride’s comb, the instrument by which the spirit seduces her worshippers and binds them to her service.

Around the picture are arranged the offerings: a bottle of gin or schnapps, a dish of red palm oil, a pile of sea-shells, a mirror of the worshipper’s own, a length of red or white cloth, and a saucer of perfume. Live fish or a live tortoise may be released into a shrine-tank of water. In the great coastal Mami Wata temples of Cotonou and Lomé, the picture stands beneath a domed canopy of blue and white cloth, surrounded by cowries, by the carved snakes of the vodun priests, and by the drums of the Egun-gun masquerade.

The colour blue and the colour red are sacred to her. The day of the week is Thursday in much of West Africa, and the time of her approach is dusk, when the lagoon is still and the wind off the sea is fresh.

Gender, Jealousy, and the Power of the Shrine

Mami Wata is a spirit who particularly claims women, but she claims men as well, and the gender politics of her worship are unusually rich. A woman who is called to Mami Wata is usually childless, in a troubled marriage, or possessed of a beauty that the village finds unsettling. She will be taken into possession by the spirit in a ceremony of drumming and dancing that can last for hours, and she will emerge as a diviner, a healer, and a keeper of the shrine. Her husband, in many cases, must accept the spirit as a co-wife.

The jealousy of Mami Wata is famous. A man who has been seduced by her may find his wealth suddenly gone and his household in ruins. A woman who neglects her shrine will be visited by sickness. A child who laughs at the picture of the spirit will fall into the lagoon. Yet Mami Wata is also the great healer. The same spirit that brings illness can take it away, and her priestesses are often the most effective curers in their villages, treating barrenness, depression, and the complaints of love.

In many coastal towns of the Bight of Benin, the Mami Wata shrine is also a court. Disputes between fishermen over a good net, between wives over a husband, between traders over a debt, are brought to the priestess for judgment, and her word is final.

Songs, Dances, and the Spirit’s Music

The music of Mami Wata is its own genre. In the shrine the agbida drum speaks to the gan, and the songs — sung in Yoruba, Ewe, Fon, and pidgin — describe the spirit’s arrival:

Mami Wata, o-o, o! She comin’ cross the sea-o! Bringin’ money, bringin’ trade-o, Mami Wata, o-o, o!

At her festivals, held at the end of the rainy season in fishing villages from Grand-Popo to Ouidah, masked dancers embody the spirit and her attendants. The masqueraders, dressed in long robes of blue and white and crowned with veils, weave through the crowd in the slow, swaying dance of the surf. The Sakpata drummers of the lagoon accompany them, and the festival ends with the casting of the spirit’s gifts — fruit, rice, cloth, and small change — into the water.

The same songs crossed the Atlantic. The Afro-Brazilian hymn to Iemanjá (“Rainha do Mar, rainha do mar, ó, lá vai uma canoa”) is a direct descendant of the West African Mami Wata song, sung each New Year’s Eve by millions of white-clad worshippers on the beaches of Rio and Salvador.

Mami Wata in Modern Life

In contemporary African and African-diasporic art, Mami Wata is everywhere. The Brazilian-American scholar Henry Drewal and the American art historian Robin Derby have written the foundational English-language studies of the figure. The Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace has placed her in the foreground of his novel The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), and the Ghanaian-British photographer James Barnor has documented her shrines over six decades. In Lagos, Accra, and Cotonou, the figure of the mermaid is the most popular image in the windows of fortune-tellers and the walls of recording studios.

In popular music, Mami Wata has been invoked by the Congolese rumba singer Franco, by the South African songstress Miriam Makeba, and by the Nigerian-British singer Sade. In the Afrofuturist novels of the last twenty years, she has been reimagined as a space-traveller, a hacker, and a sea-goddess of the climate-changed world.

Her image, too, has spread into popular culture in ways that would have astonished the fishermen of Badagry in 1900. She appears on the labels of bottled palm-wine, in the posters of West African video-films, and in the Instagram feeds of the modern shrine-keepers of Cotonou. The Mother of Waters has not been retired: she has only moved with her children across the seas.

Sources and Further Reading

Drewal, Henry John. Mami Wata: Africa’s Ancient God/dess Unveiled. ABP/Evanston, 2008.
Drewal, Henry John, and Der, eds. Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other African Water Deities. Museum for African Art, 2008.
Moore, David, and Fiedel, Stuart J. Strangers in a Strange Land: The Mami Wata Complex in African-American History. Routledge, 2016.
Rimli, Julius I. Motherism and the Mami Wata Imagery in African and African Diasporic Literature. Routledge, 2021.