Mami Wata - Mali (No reserve price)

A superb figurine depicting a Mami Wata bronze mermaid from Mali.

Mamiwata is the Mother of the waters. Half-woman, half-fish, at once earthly and aquatic, she is a divinity of the Vodun cult 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 guise of a revenant. In Kinshasa, she is even regarded as the patron saint of prostitutes.

Mamiwata is thus a deity with many faces, whose representations and cults vary according to places and those who worship her. A heroine of lake-dwelling tales, a 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 of maleficities and fears. It is undoubtedly 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 rare figures to have also given rise to effigies and anthropomorphic representations.

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

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