Mermaid deity figure

The figure found on the Thames foreshore does not resemble these Mami Wata, bearing no trace of orientalist or Hindu influences. In fact, the same elements that lend themselves to a Mami Wata attribution – a mirror-like object, cowrie shells, rich adornment, and her fishtail – might suggest a more specific, Indigenous deity. Osun, the Yoruba orisa of the Osun River, is also associated with imagery of mirrors, cowries, and wealth. Yet I found Osun through my initial instinct that her ‘mirror’ was a fan. The object has a scored border on both sides, an extra effort I felt suggested identical sides, or a fringe around the edge, and she holds it in a position that seems more natural for use as a fan. Whilst some Mami Wata priests use fringed fans,8 circular, brass fans, abẹbẹ, are strongly associated with Osun. Whilst Osun is less commonly depicted as a mermaid, her mermaid form, surrounded by cowrie shells, features on one gate at the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Nigeria. Metal has strong connections to Osun,9 possibly making a figure cast in iron a natural choice.

Both Osun and Mami Wata made their ways across the Atlantic, shaped by diaspora communities in parallel to their African counterparts, with later interactions merging, melding and influencing their depictions further. For those who conceived Mami Wata as a migrant, she was possibly an ideal figure to turn to, a foreigner who found new homes in Africa becoming a foreigner once more alongside her worshippers, and was later shaped into many distinct deities.10 Osun and her fellow water orisa Yemoja also continued to be worshipped in candomblé and other creolised religions,11 a practice of resistance when enslaved people faced violence and suppression of their indigenous identities. The influence of these diaspora spiritualities appear so strongly that early anthropologists even suggested Mami Wata was a diaspora creation later introduced to Africa.12

Ultimately, her identity remains uncertain: she could equally be another African or diasporic water spirit like Lasirèn, Mama D’Lo, Watramamma, Simbi, Dona Fish, Mamba Muntu, or another Yoruba orisa like Yemoja. What does feel concrete is her religious significance, and the religious significance of her entry into the Thames.

Worshippers of these figures have faced cycles of repression and resurgence across Africa and the Americas, complicating this academic study of their precise histories. Yet new diaspora groups are finding ways to worship, and to incorporate their practices into local landscapes. In 1970, the Thames formally became a sacred alternative to the Ganges for Hindus. Similarly, in 2016, Michelle Yaa Asantewa founded the Osun River Ritual, which is held annually in the Wandle, a tributary of the Thames.13 The event coincides with the start of the Osun-Osogbo Festival, so the Thames and Osun both become spaces to honour Osun.

In this sense, the deposition of this figure may have been deliberate, part of the African diaspora’s spiritual use of the Thames. Found in 2015, her deposition is probably recent due to her good state of preservation, but the figure herself and her life as a sacred devotional representation could be decades older. As such, she raises questions about boundaries: where culture becomes history; where the new becomes traditional; where one deity stops and another begins. She is the material product of a living, intangible heritage, of a culture being reclaimed and reworked by London’s African diaspora; a heritage intertwined and in parallel to the practice in Osun-Osogbo, in Africa, in the Americas, and wherever a body of water can be found.