Cultural Confluences: The Evolution of Mami Wata from Water Spirit to Global Icon
Mami Wata is a supernatural being who experienced at least two phases of evolution before becoming a global phenomenon. She represents a tenaciously held idea that survived an era of slavery and adapted to dozens of new cultures.
Her iconic imagery was further shaped by an improbable sequence of events that highlighted cultural exoticism in the 19th century, and in more modern times, has been influenced by mass media technologies.
A Personal Exploration of Culture
This is the second piece I’ve written on cultural confluences, following my piece entitled “Cultural Confluence of Lion images in Chinese Art”. I have long been fascinated by how ideas are often shaped at the interface between different cultures and eras.
These confluences can happen through voluntary collaborations, such as trade, or through involuntary collaborations, such as war, conquest or other events wherein one population adapts through contact with another. Whereas some stories can hearten and others dismay, both can nonetheless be compelling. An analysis of how those confluences affected the transmission of ideas may help blur some of the borders that tend to separate us today.
In many ways this piece continues a personal exploration into my interest in how one belief may give, borrow or mix with another. In Ethiopia I was interested in how differently Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity seemed from Christianity, although I was not exactly clear about how ideas may have been transmitted from one to another. In Uganda I thought it was interesting how a predominantly Christian culture could also support ancestral worship. In Cameroon, I spoke with a sorcerer and a healer in different parts of the country about their own belief systems. In some ways, they can blend with Christian or Islamic beliefs, or retain their own indigenous system.
In all of these examples, they do not just represent an interface of belief systems but an interface between modernity and tradition. It is at all of these edges between one thing and another that it’s possible to see how an idea might progress or fade.
In this article, I will use a museum artefact to stimulate a wider scope of thought and to share it with you. Some care needs to be taken with this topic. When describing Mami Wata’s passage through modern history in research literature, it’s important to remember she is an actively worshipped being and not part of some ancient vanished culture.
I am not an art historian, although I’m a lover of art history. My goal here is to write a scholarly piece that shares wonder, stirs discussion and encourages you to read the sources I’ve cited. If you can add to this discussion, please do!
The Imagination
The Artefact
Mami Wata is a supernatural being who experienced at least two phases of evolution before becoming a global phenomenon. During the Atlantic slave trade era, the African diaspora carried beliefs about Mami Wata to the Americas. Both on the way and once there, there may have been changes to her character in response to European notions of mermaids and to indigenous cultures of the Caribbean and Central America.
However, the iconic image of her that is popular today results from a strange sequence of events that involved: a 19th-century German circus; a Samoan snake charmer who may have actually been French; and a calendar company in India [1, 2].
Mami Wata’s place in discussions of cultural convergence is well deserved. She sits at the confluence of Christian, Hindu, Islam, and Amerindian belief systems. She also sits at the interface between a culture of oral tradition and a culture of mass media. Today she is respected in at least 20 African countries, as well as others such as Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad and Tobago [3, 4].
A Creature of Fortune, Fertility, Seduction and Danger
Mami Wata, pidgin English for “Mother Water” [5], refers to a class of West African water spirits that were, and still remain, popular, in areas such as Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Throughout the centuries, Mami Wata has usually been described as having the upper body or a woman and the lower body of a fish [6].
Today she is commonly shown wearing a snake around her shoulders. In West Africa, she is often portrayed as having straight hair and wearing foreign clothing, both of which help emphasise she is from somewhere else. She usually wears a watch, and carries vanity symbols of a comb and a mirror [3].
In keeping with her name, ‘Mother Water’, Mami Wata has both positive and negative associations to bodies of water. Her positive associations likely derive from the benefits of lakes and rivers, such as transport, trade, wealth and a source of fish. Her negative associations likely derive from the dangers of lakes and rivers, such as floods, drownings, and invasion routes [7].
Generally, she is also associated with fortune, fertility and seduction [1]. However, in many tales, the fortune she can bring is often fraught with its own dangers. In some places, she is also associated with environmental stewardship; in Trinidad and Tobago, she is known to punish aggressive hunters and wood cutters [8].
In some accounts, she is described as stalking people, whereas in others she seems more reactive. One common story tells of hunters discovering at the edge of a river while she combs her hair and looks at herself in a mirror she carries. When she sees them she drops her things and disappears. The hunters take her belongings back to their village. She then visits them in their dreams and demands both the return of her property and their promise of sexual fidelity to her. She rewards those who comply with her request and punishes those who do not [5].
A Confluence of West African Water Spirits and European Mermaids
In the 15th century, early European traders and explorers came to parts of modern-day Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Benin. There, local wood carvers combined local aspects of water spirit lore with the lore of mermaids [1]. The local imagery may have also been influenced by mermaid carvings which appeared on the prows of ships. Sightings of both mermaids and Mami Wata may have been related to sightings of manatees [9], which are large herbivorous mammals that live on the coasts of West African and Caribbean waters.
A fusion of lore may have also influenced personality traits. For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti, Mami Wata is called “La Sirene”, which is French for Siren [8]. Sirens trace back to Greek myths of bird women who would seduce sailors with song and cause them to navigate into waters where they would crash their ships [3]. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus is so concerned he will be charmed by their singing that he orders his men to plug their ears and he himself demands they tie him securely to ship mast so he can resist the sirens’ charms [10]. Throughout the ages, sirens have been associated with seduction.
Mami Wata Travels throughout the Americas
During the trans-Atlantic slave trade era that began in the 15th century and ended in the 19th century, millions of Africans were enslaved and dispersed across the world. In 1518, Spanish ships began taking slaves directly to colonies in the Americas. Most captives were exported from modern Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon [11]. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, European colonial powers sent between 10 and 12 million slaves across the Atlantic Ocean [12]. Carrying little except their beliefs and memories through such hardship, some carried Mami Wata with them.
And, in the plantations, she adapted to new cultures. She took on new names: La Sirene (Haiti), River Mumma (Jamaica); Yemonja (Brazil); Maman de l’Eau (Trinidad and Tobago); and Manmandlo (French Guiana) [8]. She adapted to new geographies; whereas Yorubans in West Africa worshipped her as a river deity, in Brazil and Cuba she was worshipped as a sea goddess [13]. Her habits changed: in some Caribbean Islands, she is said drown people, although some survive their watery encounter with her and they return them with new powers [3]. And she flourished in religions that themselves were becoming a mix of belief systems. In Haiti, Lasirn has become part of the Vodou tradition, which itself is a fusion of West African and Roman Catholic beliefs [14].
Van Stipriaan describes how the Mami Wata may have evolved in Suriname [7]. Between 1668 and 1830, about 241,000 slaves were taken to Suriname from the shores of Africa, from Senegal to Angola. Many of the enslaved came from areas known for worship of water spirits.
The first recorded mention of a ‘Watramama’ in Suriname was in the 1740s, and related to how a ghost called a Watermama ordered slaves to not work on certain days and instead make offerings to it. By the 1770s, colonial authorities in Suriname banned watermama dances. According to Van Stipriaan, the memoirs of the British Dutch colonial soldier John Gabriel Stedman [15] suggest that by the second half of the 18th century, Amerindian and West African water spirits may have merged to become a Watramama.
The spirit became a goddess in Wenti, a Surinamese religion that combined the beliefs of Akan and Fon slaves from Africa with Christianity [16]. Practice of the religion was banned in Suriname from 1874 to 1971, but has gained in popularity there since then [17].
Mami Wata Popularised through Mass Print Production
If the role of the African diaspora led to variation in how Mami Wata was represented in new settings, the later role of mass media technologies provided an image that led to uniformity for many of those representations. Tracing how that image of a snake charmer become so popular highlights aspects of serendipity, cultural stereotypes, trade and technology.
The context for the calendar picture that would become so well associated with the Mami Wata began in the 19th century, when the expansion of colonial empires made Europeans crave examples of exotic far flung cultures. During that period, exhibits of plants and animals from around the world provided entertainment for people. One exhibiter was Carl GC Hagenbeck, a Hamburg fish merchant who in 1848 decided to put on an exhibit of Arctic sea lions [1]. Audiences were so excited by the exhibits, he decided to expand future shows to include people. And one of those people would end up on the poster that would inspire the picture shown in Figure 2.
Although today’s circuses and variety acts tend to feature people as performers, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they sometimes featured human exhibits. While some shows recruited people of talent, others used people of origin. How they became part of the acts would be presented in cover stories that often hid the true nature of whether they were willing participants [18, 19].
In 1874, Hagenbeck created the first Volkerschauen (People shows), a show format that would feature about 400 culture groups viewed as exotic in events like it that ran until 1930. His shows featured people and animals, organised into recreate various scenes from where various indigenous groups came from. Many of them came from Ceylon, Samoa, India, Somalia, Nubia and Cameroon [20].
One of Hagenbeck’s shows featured a snake charmer — supposedly the new wife of a hunter who provided Hagenbeck with nature specimens from Southeast Asia and the Pacific. She could have been from Samoa. Or, she could have been the French woman, Emilie Poupon, also known as Nala Damajanta — a snake charmer who travelled with PT Barnam’s circus in the USA [2]. Her writhing stage prop is reflected in Figure 2.
Whoever she was, in about 1887 she posed for studio photos which later inspired a lithograph image. That image ended up on a circus poster that went from Hamburg to West Africa and it influenced how local mami wata figures were carved. Copies of that poster would remain for decades and eventually be mass produced with the help of another cultural influence.
Drewal describes how elements of Hinduism may have influenced the followers of Mami Wata [21]. By the 1930s, Indian traders had a significant cultural influence in areas of Africa where she was worshipped. Believers interpreted images of Hindu goddesses as specific examples of the water spirit they already revered.
In the 1950s, merchants in Ghana sent a print of the poster image to a calendar company in India. There, a reproduction of the lithograph was mass produced and influenced how the world would eventually tend to view her. The calendar image became popular in West and later in Central Africa. Drewel estimates that the print influenced how she has been visualised in 20 countries.
Her Value in Informing Modern Rural Development Policies
Mami Wata remains important in the beliefs of many people. Richard Paterson writes of the need to accommodate beliefs in her when it comes to waterpower development policy [22]. He describes the reluctance of Congolese villagers to build micro-hydro power stations on the turbulent waters of Anga Wene.
Small power generators can provide great benefit for running various kinds of machinery, but such benefit needs to consider the owner of the water, which many villagers there regard as the Mami Wata. She can grant wishes for prosperity, but always for a price. If the price isn’t paid, she may demand the lives of family members of people she has benefitted. Early micro-hydro projects in the area were often linked with deaths related to not satisfying her needs.
Paterson suggests that belief in the Mami Wata may help limit the idea of individualised ownership of water resources that hold value for a community. If a water spirit owns it, then any one person may not. When villagers express concerns about Mami Wata, they may also be indicating underlying concerns about who owns and who benefits from micro-hydro projects built on a communal resource.
Mami Wata: A Tenacious Belief
In researching this narrative, I wasn’t just impressed by all the different cultural confluences that shaped this interesting being. I was amazed at how as a belief she managed to survive at all. There are plenty of gods and supernatural beings who have faded into history. It is an interesting thought to consider how the ones that remain today have survived through the centuries.
As far as I can tell, Mami Wata never had the endorsement of wide ranging empires like the Roman Empire for Christianity, the Mohammedan armies for Islam or the Mauryan and Kushan Empires for Buddhism.
Belief in her spread along coastal Africa, and created regional variation of her details and attributes. I never came across any long running literary record about Mami Wata. It doesn’t seem like there were large councils far and near gathering to decide on a single interpretation of how she should act and appear to all followers.
In the Americas it seems she survived through oral tradition, which would have been vulnerable to the high mortality of African slaves. Her attributes were influenced by new cultures but she did not drown and disappear in them.
And, far from being left behind in modernity, she has thrived through its technologies. Did she survive in spite of all these factors or because of them?
References
The most important references for this piece are works by Drewal [1, 20] and Van Stipriaan [7].
[1] Drewal, HJ. “Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas.” African Arts, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 60–83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20447886. Accessed 27 Apr. 2020
[2] Nala Damajanti, Wikipedia, May 1, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nala_Damajanti
[3] Becoming Mermaids. Part of the Mythic Creatures exhibition. American Museum of Natural History, July 8, 2020, https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/mythic-creatures/water/becoming-mermaids
[4] Gathitu, J. The Legend of the Mermaid Goddess from Africa. African Explorer Magazine, October 17, 2018, https://africanexplorermagazine.com/2018/10/17/the-legend-of-the-mermaid-goddess-from-africa/
[5] Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and its Diasporas: Mami Wata. Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, July 8, 2020, https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/mamiwata/intro.html
[6] Hindrew, MVH. Mami Wata: From Myth to Devine Reality, July 8, 2020, http://www.mamiwata.com/mami/mami.htm
[7] Stipriaan, A. “Watramama’s transatlantic voyage: legacy of the slave trade with Suriname.” The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers (2007): 277–294, https://alexvanstipriaan.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2007-Watramamas-Transatlantic-voyage.pdf
[8] Mami Wata. Wikipedia, July 2, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mami_Wata
[9] Koshy, Elena. Saving the world’s last remaining mermaids in Peninsular Malaysia. October 13, 2019, https://www.nst.com.my/lifestyle/sunday-vibes/2019/10/529417/saving-worlds-last-remaining-mermaids-peninsular-malaysia.
[10] The Sirens and Ulysses, Wikipedia, June 17, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirens_and_Ulysses
[11] Adi, H. Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, BBC, October 5, 2020, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/africa_article_01.shtml
[12] Lewis, T. Transatlantic slave trade. Encyclopedia Britannica. Web Site. April 6, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade
[13] Yemoja, Wikipedia, June 21, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemoja
[14] McAlister, Elizabeth. Vodou. Encyclopedia Britannica, February 13, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Vodou
[15] John Gabriel Stedman, Wikipedia, June 10, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gabriel_Stedman
[16] Winti, Wikipedia, May 3, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winti
[17] Matory JL, Smithson B, Lan C, Blow J, Lankard B, Surinamese and Dutch Winti, Duke University, 2015, https://sacredart.caaar.duke.edu/content/surinamese-and-dutch-winti
[18] Sara “Saartjie” Baartman, South African History Online, September 3, 2019, https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/sara-saartjie-baartman.
[19] Newkirk, P. The man who was caged in a zoo. The Guardian, June 3, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/the-man-who-was-caged-in-a-zoo
[20] Dreesbach, Anne. “Colonial Exhibitions,’Völkerschauen’and the Display of the’Other’Colonial Exhibitions and’Völkerschauen’.” (2012), http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/backgrounds/european-encounters/anne-dreesbach-colonial-exhibitions-voelkerschauen-and-the-display-of-the-other
[21] Mittman, AS, Dendle, PJ eds. The Ashgate research companion to monsters and the monstrous. Routledge, 2017.
[22] Peterson, RB. “Why Mami Wata matter: local considerations for sustainable waterpower development policy in Central Africa.” Local Environment 11.1 (2006): 109–125, https://www.appropedia.org/images/e/e5/Why_Mami_Wata_Matter.pdf
Image Credits
Artefact image:
head-piece, British Museum, July 8, 2020, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Af1993-10-7
Calendar Image
“Chromolithograph of a snake charmer, inspired by the performer Maladamatjaute (Nala Damajanti). Printed in the 1880s by the Adolph Friedlander Company in Hamburg, the poster gave rise to the common image of Mami Wata, a water goddess of the African diaspora. Reprinted in 1955 by the Shree Ram Calendar Company in Bombay”
Borrowed from Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mami_Wata#/media/File:Mami_Wata_poster.png
