Mami Wata

Mami Wata is a water spirit of West, Central, East and Southern Africa and of the Atlantic diaspora, not a Yoruba orisha; the name is a creole form of 'mother water'. Henry John Drewal traces her to fifteenth-century African encounters with European mermaid imagery, and her iconography was reshaped in the mid-nineteenth century by a European chromolithograph of the snake charmer Nala Damajanti, and later by Hindu prints brought by Indian merchants. She is a spirit of wealth, beauty, fertility and healing, and she is related to Caribbean and South American water spirits such as Lasiren in Haiti and Mae d'Agua in Brazil. The colonial trade and the slave trade are part of her history, not background to it.

Mami Wata is served at the water with white flowers, perfume, white cloth and coins, and her practice is the shrine at the water's edge and the keeping of her taboos. In the diaspora she is honoured as Lasiren and Mae d'Agua, and the traditions have their own houses. The water is the shrine.