BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA:
Film Title: Mami Wata – A West Afrikan Folklore; Director: C.J. “Fiery” Obasi; Year made: 2023; Country of production:Nigeria; Language(s) of film:Pidgin English; Length of film:73 minutes.
GENRE:
Feature film
SYNOPSIS:
In West Africa, Mami Wata is popularly known as the goddess of the sea/ocean. Speculations on her appearance and what she can do for/to those who encounter her have inspired many stories that have duly circulated from popular culture to contemporary charismatic churches. Often portrayed in the cultural iconography as a half-woman and half-fish creature, the fascination with her spurs many myths about her ability to give wealth and power, as well as the dangers of dalliance with a spirit that dwells in the unfathomable depths of the sea. Depending on who is telling the story and what they seek to achieve, Mami Wata bestows wealth, grants children to favored supplicants, and seduces unwary lustful men. A folklore as much as a political allegory, Mami Wata is a fantasy film that revives some of these stories and puts them into new narrative structures. Set near the seaside village of Iyi, the film tells the story of a community where people had grown dissatisfied with Mami Wata who did not seem to be keeping pace with the rapid pace of social development unfolding around them.
KEYWORDS:
- West Africa
- Mami Wata
- Transactional spirituality
- Sea spirits
- African-European entanglements
BACKGROUND/CONTEXT:
Mami Wata maintains a rather delicate harmony with the community who expect that their sustenance of her shrine is reciprocated through social growth and development. The frustrating slow pace of temporal progress is aptly captured in the slow-paced start of the film. Time lags, and like the viewer worked up to impatience with the lack of action in the narration, the people of Iyi also want a trigger that will advance the narration of their history. Everyone begins to get their wish when a little child dies from a condition treatable with modern medicine, but unapplied by those who would rather set Mami Wata’s powers to task. The people of Iyi, already disaffected with Mami Wata and her priestess, Mama Efe (Rita Edochie), start to revolt. Mama Efe hears the drums of conspiracy restlessly beating all around her but remains protective of the privileges she derives from the custodianship of Mami Wata’s shrine.
Several parables are wrapped in this film’s plot. First is the cautionary tale of swimming against the tide of changes as well as demanding one without planning for the costs. Anyone familiar with the cycles of liberation movements, armed rebellions, and coup d’etats in Africa cannot miss the pattern: promises of an inauguration of a new order, the inevitable descent into power struggles to protect fragile gains, and the spate of destruction that locks everyone into an infernal cycle of ferocity and violence. Mami Wata captures this recurrent dimension of the African political savior complex, not as a cynical pronouncement on change itself, but how its shoddy foundations often quickly turn the liberators into executioners. The path to change is not always white and black, a complexity that is visually accentuated by the monochromatic cinematography (shot by Lílis Soare) that not only places the film out of time but also gives the actors strong filmic presence. Their faces and bodies are marked with white paint, rich visual symbols of African spiritual iconography made famous by popular artistes such as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Beyonce. The sea, a major character in the film, is magically transformed through the stunning night shots and the wave splashes that sync with the throbbing sound score. These effects not only contribute to Mami Wata’s folk style of narrative and otherworldly qualities, but they also bring out the majestic totality of the sea as it submerges the people in history.
ACADEMIC COMMENTARY:
What is esoteric about the film?
The lesson here for the study of esoteric practices, especially among indigenous people who are taken to “worship” their gods, is the exchange-based nature of human-divine relationships. The idea of worship, translated from English language and culture where the notion of God is monotheistic, expresses a worshipful adoration. Applied to indigenous esoteric practices, it is more nuanced. Mami Wata demonstrates that the relationship with gods, deities, and spirits are—and have always been—transactional, negotiable, and fragile. When the cost of sustaining them outweighs the benefit, the deity is discounted and ultimately imperiled.
Where and how does the film address esoteric practices?
In Mami Wata, the rebels repeatedly taunt Mami Wata’s devotees to demonstrate her power. This is telling. While religious and mystical practices might be irrational means, the goal to make them support social life and development must always be visible. Power is a verb, an action that manifests in concrete terms, not merely an abstraction. Gods are not Gods for all time; they earn their keep.
For all the conservatism of Mama Efe, it is interesting that Mami Wata herself is a goddess of modernity—an innovative blend of African spirituality with Western-derived iconography. People tend to conflate Mami Wata with the various indigenous water deities present in several riverine peoples’ myths, but she is a far more recent creation. According to Henry Drewal who traced the origins of this enigmatic creature, Mami Wata evolved from the ambiguities of the African encounters with the Europeans in the 15th century. The white visitors from unknown lands who appeared on their horizons through their intriguing water vessels were initially taken for spirits to have emerged out of water. For the people who already believed in the myths of water spirits, much of the intriguing details about these people who seemed to have sailed out of the belly of the sea confirmed their imagination of the fantastical world that existed in its depths below. The mix of fascination and curiosity that greeted the novelty of meeting other humans was buttressed by the cultural exchanges and trading relationships that would eventually develop between the parties, economic opportunities that brought wealth, precarity, and crucial historical changes. While Mami Wata is proof of adoption of modernity and the pragmatism of Africans, her human intermediary’s resistance to external intervention is what also results when the charisma of a novel phenomenon has been grounded in institutional procedures and custodianship that stymies its responsiveness to emerging reality.
What makes the film relevant for esoteric studies?
This is not a mere cinema fantasy; there is a real example of deicide that proves this. On September 27, 1957, the Kalabari people of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria announced they had killed one of their gods, Owu-Akpama, the shark-God. We learn that due to the activities of the Portuguese slaving ships, the balance of the ecosystem was being seriously disrupted. The sharks which had previously maintained some distance from human habitation had tasted the flesh of the people thrown overboard by the slavers. They began to swim closer to the villages and attack fisherman’s boats, resulting in severe economic consequences. Wariboko called the metaphysical and historical act to perform a deicide a “politics of interruption,” one that demonstrates the freedom of the Kalabari spirit and the agency to act upon their circumstances. When a god is appraised and falls short of supporting life, their end has come. It was perhaps this fate Mami Wata wanted to skirt by throwing up a stranger from its belly when Mama Efe would not budge. Knowing how restless the people who need to push history forward can become, and how she herself will soon become imperiled by not being responsive to the yearnings of the people, Mami Wata pulls the trigger to activate the showdown that reshapes history.
Several parables are wrapped in this film’s plot. First is the cautionary tale of swimming against the tide of changes as well as demanding one without planning for the costs. Anyone familiar with the cycles of liberation movements, armed rebellions, and coup d’etats in Africa cannot miss the pattern: promises of an inauguration of a new order, the inevitable descent into power struggles to protect fragile gains, and the spate of destruction that locks everyone into an infernal cycle of ferocity and violence. Mami Wata captures this recurrent dimension of the African political savior complex, not as a cynical pronouncement on change itself, but how its shoddy foundations often quickly turn the liberators into executioners.
Abimbola Adelakun
References:
Drewal, H. J. (2017). Beauteous Beast: The Water Deity Mami Wata in Africa. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (pp. 117-142). Routledge.
Wariboko, N. (2019). Ethics and society in Nigeria: identity, history, political theory (Vol. 82). University of Rochester Press.
