Mami Wata - Mali (No reserve price)

Superb figurine representing a Mami Wata bronze siren from Mali.

Mamiwata is the Mother of the waters. Half-woman, half-fish, both terrestrial and aquatic, she is a deity of the Vodun worship in Togo and Benin, a water spirit feared by fishermen in Nigeria and Ghana, but also a man-eater who, in popular imagination, roams at night in the form of a revenant. In Kinshasa, she is even regarded as the patron saint of prostitutes.

Mamiwata is thus a divinity with many faces, whose representations and cults vary according to the places and those who pay her homage. Heroine of lacustrine tales, figure of urban legends, she gathers a multitude of symbols that change from one culture to another. She can embody both virtues and hopes, but also maleficence and fears. It is probably this ambivalence that gives her strength and explains the unique place she occupies in African imaginaries.

This mermaid is one of the rare deities of African mythology to be represented so recurrently in visual arts. The deities of the Yoruba pantheon are among the few figures that have also yielded effigies and human representations.

It is worth recalling here one of the peculiarities of many African spiritual traditions: the capacity to recognize a soul, a presence and a force in beings and objects drawn from the animal, vegetal or mineral worlds. These elements are not regarded as mere things. They can be invested with powers and symbols, and thus become intermediaries between humans and the invisible world — that of ancestors, the dead and spirits.

Mamiwata fully fits into this worldview. She belongs to this space where the visible and the invisible meet, where beliefs, fears and hopes mingle, and where the same figure can take on meanings deeply different according to the communities that tell her story.