Mami Wata

A water spirit venerated across West and Central Africa and the diaspora: beauty, wealth and the water.

Mami Wata is a water spirit known across West and Central Africa, from Senegal and Ghana to Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Cameroon and the Congo basin, and across the African diaspora. Her name comes from pidgin English, "Mammy Water": mother of the water. In Ghana she is often called Maame Water. She is not the spirit of one people, but a figure many cultures share, each with its own stories.

She is usually pictured as a beautiful woman, often as a mermaid, or with a large snake wrapped around her shoulders. That best-known image goes back, as the art historian Henry Drewal showed, to a nineteenth-century European print of a snake charmer that circulated widely in West Africa from the late 1800s and was taken up as her portrait. In Congolese popular painting, for example in the work of Chéri Samba, she became one of the great themes.

Mami Wata stands for beauty, wealth, desire and healing, but also for danger and jealousy: she can bring prosperity, and she can demand loyalty. In Benin and Togo she is venerated as a vodun, with her own shrines and devotees, who often dress in white or red. In Haiti, Lasirèn, the mermaid of Vodou, is related to her but is not the same figure. In Suriname the watra mama of Winti are sometimes compared with her, and Barinya in particular. And the Yoruba orishas Yemayá and Ochún, also connected with water, are other figures again, not other names for her.

In dreams, a beautiful woman by or in the water, a mermaid, a comb or a mirror at the riverside, or a snake around a woman are often connected with Mami Wata. How such a dream is read depends on who reads it. Devotees may see a call or a blessing. Some Pentecostal churches in Nigeria and Ghana call her a marine spirit and read such dreams as a spiritual attack or a spirit spouse; that is their view, described here without endorsing it. A reading outside both frames looks at what the dream touches: attraction, a wish for wealth or freedom, or deep feeling that the water stands for. Dreamkin does not read such a dream as a prediction or as proof that a spirit is at work.