Mami Wata - Mali (No reserve price)

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

Mamiwata is the Mother of 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 guise of a revenant. In Kinshasa, she is even considered the patron saint of prostitutes.

Mamiwata is thus a goddess with multiple faces, whose representations and cults vary according to place and those who worship her. Heroine of lake-dwelling 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 undoubtedly this ambivalence that gives her strength and explains the singular 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 divinities of the Yoruba pantheon are among the few figures that have also given rise to effigies and human representations.

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

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