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Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo

Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo · Chapter IX: West African Vodun

Mami Wata: The Water Spirit of West Africa and the Diaspora

Who Mami Wata is: the African water spirit of wealth, beauty and danger, her mermaid and snake-charmer images, her shrines in Togo and Benin and her diaspora.

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Mami Wata ("Mother Water" in West African Pidgin English) is a water spirit, or a family of water spirits, honoured across West and Central Africa and in the African diaspora. Usually pictured as a beautiful woman with long hair, a mermaid's tail or a snake around her shoulders, she is associated with wealth, beauty, healing and the allure of things from overseas, and also with danger, jealousy and the price of her favours. In Togo, Benin and Ghana she is served as a vodun with her own priests, shrines and initiations.

Who Mami Wata Is§

Rivers, lagoons and the sea have always been sacred in West and Central Africa, and many peoples honoured water spirits long before the name Mami Wata appeared, among them the Yoruba orisha of rivers and the sea, the water spirits of the Igbo and Ijo of the Niger Delta, and the simbi spirits of the Kongo. Mami Wata belongs to this world but has a distinctive character. She is a spirit of the trading coast, foreign as well as local, and her followers often describe her as a light-skinned or "foreign" woman from beneath the water, where she lives in a wealthy realm full of goods.

Scholars debate whether Mami Wata is best understood as one spirit or as a class. In many places people speak of "mami watas" in the plural, including male counterparts sometimes called Papi Wata, and the name has been applied to many local water deities. The art historian Henry John Drewal, the leading scholar of her imagery, describes Mami Wata as a pan-African phenomenon honoured in more than twenty countries, with different meanings in each, but sharing a set of images and associations that spread along trade routes. (For the wider religious context see African Traditional Religions.)

Mermaids, Snake Charmers and Hindu Prints: The Making of an Image§

Mami Wata's appearance is a record of centuries of contact between Africa and the wider world. Drewal argues that the idea of a water spirit associated with foreign wealth goes back to the first encounters with European ships in the fifteenth century, when African carvers began to depict mermaids, a European motif, on objects made for Portuguese patrons. Mermaid figures from ship prows, and the mermaid imagery of European sailors, were adopted on the coast, and in some places carved mermaid figures became the shrine images of water spirits.

The most influential single image arrived much later. In the late nineteenth century a printing firm in Hamburg produced a colour lithograph of a female snake charmer, a performer known as Nala Damajanti who appeared in European shows, with long black hair and a large snake draped around her body. Copies of this print, and later reprints made in India and elsewhere in the twentieth century, circulated widely in West Africa. Devotees recognised in it the true appearance of Mami Wata, and the snake charmer became the standard image of the spirit, copied in sculpture, shrine painting and popular art across the region.

A third layer came from India. From the mid-twentieth century, Indian merchants, films and religious posters spread images of Hindu deities along the West African coast. In Togo, Benin, Ghana and Nigeria some Mami Wata devotees adopted chromolithographs of gods and goddesses such as Lakshmi, Shiva and Hanuman as representations of particular water spirits, interpreting their many arms, animal companions and rich ornaments in their own terms. Scholars such as Dana Rush have studied how these prints were re-read rather than simply copied: an Indian goddess becomes, on a Beninese altar, a Mami Wata spirit with her own name and rules. (On the original deities, see Hindu Gods and Goddesses.)

Mami Wata Vodun in Togo and Benin§

On the Gbe-speaking coast of Togo and Benin, home of the Vodun religion, Mami Wata is served as a vodun alongside older water spirits. Many devotees come to her after illness, infertility, troubling dreams or other misfortunes that a diviner attributes to her call. Through initiation they become her servants, and some become priests and priestesses who lead shrines and heal others.

Mami Wata shrines are striking. Altars may be painted with mermaids, snakes and Indian deities and crowded with mirrors, perfumes, powders, combs, jewellery, dolls, bottles of soft drinks and gin, sweets and other manufactured goods, many of them imported. Devotees often dress in white, the colour of purity, or in colours associated with particular spirits, and ceremonies include drumming, dancing and possession, in which the spirit may arrive, admire herself in a mirror, demand perfume or sweet drinks and speak to the community. Rules of cleanliness and sometimes of diet and sexual conduct are common.

Ethnographers who have worked on this coast, among them Judy Rosenthal on Ewe vodun in Togo and Dana Rush in Benin, describe these practices as a way in which people engage with modernity, money and foreign goods, and with the long history of the Atlantic trade that brought those goods to their shores.

Wealth, Beauty and Danger: The Meanings of Mami Wata§

Mami Wata is above all a spirit of ambiguous power. Stories across the region tell of people who encounter her by the water, or find her comb or mirror, and are offered riches in exchange for loyalty. Some devotees describe a "spiritual marriage" with Mami Wata or Papi Wata, which brings success but may make an earthly marriage difficult or childbearing impossible. Wealth from Mami Wata is often regarded with suspicion, as something gained by a secret bargain rather than honest work, and some anthropologists have read these stories as moral commentary on the sudden, unequal fortunes of colonial and postcolonial economies.

Her beauty and sexuality are equally ambivalent. She can grant attractiveness and charm, but she is also jealous and capricious, and neglect of her rules is said to bring illness or loss. At the same time she is a healer, and many of her priestesses are respected for helping women with fertility problems and for treating illnesses that clinics could not resolve. As with other spirit traditions, practitioners and scholars note that people seek her help alongside medical care, and that the language of spirit possession can express personal and social distress.

Mami Wata in the Diaspora: Lasirèn, Watramama and Yemanjá§

Enslaved Africans carried beliefs about water spirits to the Americas, where they mixed with mermaid images and Catholic iconography. In Haitian Vodou, Lasirèn is a mermaid lwa who carries a mirror and comb, associated with the sea, music and wealth and closely linked to Ezili and Agwe (see The Lwa of Haitian Vodou). In Suriname and Guyana the Winti religion honours a water spirit called Watramama, and in Brazil Mãe d'Água is a folk water mother. The Yoruba orisha of the sea, Yemọja, called Yemayá in Cuba and Yemanjá in Brazil, is a distinct deity, but in Brazil she is often depicted in popular art as a mermaid, and her great festival in Salvador on 2 February draws crowds who send gifts out to sea (see Candomblé and Umbanda and Santería and the Orishas).

Whether these figures descend directly from Mami Wata or share common roots in older African water spirits is debated; Drewal and others treat them as members of a single wider family of water divinities connected by the Atlantic world. Since the late twentieth century, some African Americans and Caribbean people have also turned to Mami Wata as part of a broader return to African religion, establishing shrines and organisations in the United States.

The rise of Pentecostal Christianity in West Africa has made Mami Wata a frequent target. Preachers in Ghana and Nigeria describe "marine spirits" and "spirit husbands and wives" as demons, and deliverance services promise to break their hold; the anthropologist Birgit Meyer showed how Ewe Pentecostals in Ghana reinterpreted local spirits, including water spirits, as agents of the Devil. Some Muslim communities have similarly condemned devotion to her, while others have long coexisted with spirit practices along the coast.

Mami Wata is also a star of African popular culture. She appears in Congolese urban painting, in Nigerian and Ghanaian films and in the work of contemporary artists, who use her to explore gender, desire, migration and global trade. Major exhibitions, notably the one organised by Drewal at the Fowler Museum in 2008, have shown how a single spirit gathered images from Europe, India and Africa into one of the most widely shared religious figures of the modern African world. Her devotees, meanwhile, continue to gather at shrines and at public celebrations such as the national Vodun day held each 10 January in Benin.

Frequently asked questions§

What does Mami Wata mean?§

Mami Wata means "Mother Water" in West African Pidgin English. The name refers to a water spirit, or a family of water spirits, honoured across West and Central Africa and in parts of the diaspora.

Is Mami Wata a mermaid?§

She is often depicted as a mermaid, an image that came partly from European ships and trade goods, but she is also shown as a woman with a snake, based on a nineteenth-century German print of a snake charmer. Devotees regard these images as ways of picturing a spirit who lives in the water.

Is Mami Wata the same as Yemayá?§

No. Yemayá (Yemọja, Yemanjá) is a Yoruba orisha of the sea and motherhood, served in Cuba and Brazil. In Brazil she is sometimes shown as a mermaid and shares some imagery with Mami Wata, but the two have different origins and forms of worship.

Where is Mami Wata worshipped?§

Mami Wata is honoured across West and Central Africa, especially in Togo, Benin, Ghana and Nigeria, where she has initiated priests and shrines. Related water spirits are served in Haiti, Suriname, Brazil and among some practitioners in the United States.

Sources and further reading§