Mami Wata

Historically, Mami Wata is conceived of as an exotic female entity from Europe or elsewhere, often a white woman with a particular interest in objects foreign to West Africans that her adherents place at her shrines.

This snake charmer print soon overtook Mami Wata's earlier mermaid iconography in popularity in some parts of Africa.

Mami Wata is especially venerated in parts of Africa and in the Atlantic diaspora and has also been demonized in some African Christian and Islamic communities in the region.

She is typically represented as free of any kind of social bonds and as a foreign entity, and "broadly identified with Europeans rather than any African ethnic group or ancestors".

[2] Scholars trace the origins of Mami Wata to encounters to depictions of European mermaids witnessed by West Africans as early as the 1400s and 1500s.

As summarized by scholar and adherent Henry John Drewal: Substantial evidence suggests that the concept of Mami Wata has its origins in the first encounters of Africans and Europeans in the fifteenth century.

As an Afro-Portuguese ivory shows, an African sculptor (probably Sapi, on the coast of Sierra Leone) was commissioned to create a mermaid image for his patrons as early as 1490-1530.

[3] Around the mid-1800s, a lithograph of the snake charmer Nala Damajanti from Europe became popular associated with imagery around Mami Wata, likely originating in Hamburg, Germany.

[6] Wintrob recorded that "confirmed that some ten per cent of male patients requiring in-patient treatment for psychotic disorders, revealed a system of delusions relating to possession by Mammy Water".

[7]Wintrob records that in Liberian Mammy Water folk belief, anyone who has contact with her will become wealthy and gained good luck.

One of his informants, a man from the Vai people, provides the following account: If you ever come across Mammy Water sitting down a rock combing her hair, you should yell at her.

[10]Wintrob records that this was not always the case: in some instances folk belief dictated that Mammy Water's contact need not be celibate with her and could in fact have a large family.

The figure's popularity spread from the colonial period onward and over time her worship became increasingly syncretic with imagery and customs from Christianity with a heavy European influence.

In 2012, Duwel writes that over the previous 20 to 30 years, Mami Wati has therefore become "a primary target of a widespread and growing religious movement led by evangelical (Pentacostal) Christians and fundamentalist Muslims who seek to denigrate and demonize indigenous African faiths."