2d • Theater | Media
Black Mermaids
For centuries, Black enslaved communities invoked mermaids as they organized rebellions against slavery. From the 16th century, kidnapped West African ancestors brought water spirits across the Atlantic and introduced them to the New World: the simbi from the Congo, the orisha (like Oshun) from Nigeria, or the vodun (like Ayida Wedo) from the Fon. In West African lore, these water spirits were worshiped for healing and protection, and they took many forms, from snakes to fish-tailed women.
Slavers also used the image of the mermaid, seeing it as a cultural patron of their slaving enterprise, a wraith that delivered the "amazing grace" of safe passage across treacherous seas. But to the enslaved Africans transported on these ships, that mermaid was a symbol of righteous rebellion and holy mutinies. This is because West Africans often saw water spirits as arbiters of justice—they preserved social harmony, and if that harmony was disturbed by human avarice, watery destruction was sure to follow.
By the 19th century, after thousands of coercive journeys across the Atlantic, West Africans had absorbed European images of mermaids—from ship figureheads to a mass-produced chromolithograph of a dark-skinned female Samoan snake charmer, Maladamatjaute—and remade the Western mythic creature into the mermaid, Mami Wata, Mother of the waters.
SOURCE: Time Magazine
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Black Mermaids
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