Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora

Sacred Waters, Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Henry John Drewal and published by Indiana University Press in 2008, is an edited scholarly volume on the water spirit Mami Wata as venerated across West and Central Africa and carried into the African diaspora, pairing art historical and ethnographic essays with images of shrines, altars and devotional objects. Drewal is an art historian who has published extensively on African and diaspora religious art specifically. Its strength is treating Mami Wata as an actively developing devotion rather than a fixed folkloric figure, documenting how new imagery, including imported prints and calendar art, has been absorbed into the tradition within living memory. Its limit is that a volume built around visual and material culture speaks most directly to shrine practice and iconography, so a claim about the specific theology or oral narrative content of a given region's Mami Wata devotion benefits from a source closer to that region's own oral tradition.