Representation of the African water goddess as mermaid

The core area ofMami Wata is the region from Cameroon to Ghana but she is known in many other countries. In a much standardised way she is portrayed as a mermaid with long straight hair and a light skin (generally non-African features – see also Bernard, this volume). Kathleen O’Brian Wicker describes the Mami Wata cult as a ‘complex transcultural phenomenon composed of elements from widely disparate places and traditions’ (2005: 5629). Though I am not interested in extracting the ‘authentic’ roots of a cultural phenomenon (Hackett 2008: 406), it is important to stress the diversity of the roots of the Mami Wata representation because it will be significant later in the discussion of the Brazilian case.3