Mojana Research Articles

The Microwave Monitoring of Water With Applications (MAMI WATA) MIRS Workshop: A Brief Report [Conference Reports

The Microwave Monitoring of Water With Applications (MAMI WATA) MIRS Workshop: A Brief Report [Conference Reports

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Black Aesthetics and Deep Water: Fish-People, Mermaid Art and Slave Memory in South Africa

ABSTRACT Mami Wata is a water spirit venerated across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds. In South Africa, a water spirit who is a mermaid figure goes by many names and is either feared or revered for her other-wordly powers. This mermaid figure, I argue, functions as site of slavery memory as well as a reminder of the troubled relationship black and previously enslaved communities have with water. I analyse artistic representations of the figure of the “watermeisie” (water maiden/water girl), a kind of mermaid creature who is half-human and half-fish. I discuss how this figure functions as a discursive site for South African women artists’ investigations into the before- and afterlives of slavery. I argue that the watermeisie as nomadic figure provides us with a speculative re-mapping of slave memory in Southern Africa. The article examines how the ocean and the figure of the mermaid appear in works by Koleka Putuma, Claudette Schreuders and Nelisiwe Xaba, artists who have brought the watermeisie with all its complexity in South African waters and discourse into focus, by charting a map of slave genealogies using the roots/routes of slavery in and out of water.

Posidaeja and Mami Wata: The online afterlives of two mermaid goddesses

This article examines two examples of fanfiction on oceanic mythologies: ‘Another day, another offering’ by sweetbydesign (2021), about Posideaja, and ‘Mami Wata’ by lucien_cramp (2021). Through both stories, age-old archetypes of mermaid goddesses are harnessed for the environmental agenda. In their fannish rewritings, the authors inverse many Romantic mermaid tropes to empower the mermaid and to confirm the connection between the mermaid and oceanic awareness. Moreover, in their latest remediations, Posideaja’s and Mami Wata’s bodies go against widespread standards for physical beauty and for fitness (i.e. functionality, such as being fit for labour). As such, these two updated mermaids open up a wide range of possibilities for identification and inspiration for their creators as well as their audiences. With their new representations of Posideaja and Mami Wata, the authors thus address two interconnected problems: the oppression of women (in terms of beauty and fitness norms) and the environmental damage done to the oceans (in terms of the acidification of oceans, increases in ocean temperatures and rising sea-levels).

Submerged Narratives: Memorializing Enslavement in Eve Sandler’s Mami Wata Crossing

In Harlem-based artist Eve Sandler’s installation Mami Wata Crossing (2008), text, image, object, and film converge to form an intimate memorial to enslaved ancestors and also honors transatlantic water spirits called Mami Wata. Sandler engages maternal lineages by mobilizing practices honoring water spirits—often characterized as migratory maternal figures—as a lens through which to reconfigure memories of the slave trade and narratives of women’s labor. As a presentation of Black women’s narratives of diasporic belonging within the United States, the installation emerges as an alternative archive of materials that allows for the experiential activation of family histories and Afro-Atlantic ritual practices as lived realities. The installation expands the purview of a slave memorial by combining media whose impermanence challenges the purpose of monumental public art within understandings of Black women’s histories. Sandler seeks diasporic cultural connection by ritually performing historical haunting. In this article, I propose a rethinking of ways that public institutions make room for visual representation of African American women’s histories by reconnecting these histories to Afro-Atlantic ritual practices. I argue that, by activating inherited objects as a sacred material history, Sandler memorializes gendered experiences of enslavement and nonlinear, submerged narratives through the recurrent visual form of the Afro-Atlantic altar. In Sandler’s work, the submerged narrative indicates a historical remix made visible, the remnant contents of family albums, homes, and bits of agrarian landscapes lashed together as a signal buoy for that which remains out of sight.

Blood in the Water: Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic as Children’s Petrofiction

Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic (2015), written in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, deliberates the special problem of talking to children about oil. How does one tackle the subject of oil when addressing young people? How are children enabled to participate in discourses on petroleum? The novel also reveals a dilemma: the resource that we associate with comfort and progress actually contaminates, wounds, and lays waste to natural and human ecosystems. Caught in the mucky conundrum of oil, Bayou Magic reveals the challenges of talking to children about oil and oil catastrophes. In striving to meet the expectation that children’s fiction should offer a hopeful, if not happy, ending, Bayou Magic resorts to a resolution that “contains” the oil spill but sidesteps the problem of our persisting dependence on oil. But the novel’s allusion to the African deity Mami Wata is significant, as the figure connects the oppression of Black peoples to the exploitation of natural resources. As such, the novel uses fantastical elements not to imply that only something magical or divine can save us from disaster; rather, it signals that projects of environmental justice require openness to and embrace of radically imaginative solutions.

African Arts — Global Conversations

African Arts — Global Conversations

Tales from the Congo River: Catching Mami Wata

Digital culture produces new dislocations, proximities and anxieties. Central here is “meme” culture, whose fluid movement morphs in transmission, drawing on older cultural symbols to create a feedback loop. One folkloric aquatic figure from the African continent and its diasporas, known as Mami Wata, exemplifies this memetic force that is carried over into the digital realm. Mami Wata is dualistic: human and water creature, beautiful and terrifying, pre-colonial and modern. She is fluid, not bound by traditionally grounded mobilities, and her origins are mysterious. Further, she thrives through time and place via rumour and her message and meaning are in constant flux. She is also a symbol of temptation, which carries with it anxiety. Mami Wata is said to haunt the banks of the mighty Congo River and its tributaries, waiting for new victims, thus serving as a cautionary tale, warning people of these potential fluvial supernatural encounters. As we will see, in the face of digitalisation and globalisation, contemporary memes and viral videos of Mami Wata give us a screen to view our own anxious projections. And yet she also reveals the possibility of encounter: an other who shows us another way. Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) beginning in 2012, what emerges are parallels between Mami Wata and virality, and how they represent both an attitude and an ambiance in Kinshasa. What is more, we find that Mami Wata shows us a structure by which rumours, memes and in-group culture endure through time, not despite, but thanks to their mysterious origins and fluid meanings.

Mammy Water and Her Women’s Cult during the Nigeria-Biafra War in Oguta

ABSTRACT The Nigeria-Biafra war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970, was fought on various fronts and in various tactics. Although the war was about the independence of the Republic of Biafra from Nigeria, for Oguta people of Southeastern Nigeria, it was a challenge to their goddess, Mammy Water and the people’s faith in her to protect their lives and properties. This paper, thus, studies the involvement of Mammy Water and her women cult during the Nigeria-Biafra war in Oguta. The findings indicated that the intervention of the goddess and her cult members in the war is a well-known event in Oguta.

Witness to a passing

Water stories told in Kilimanjaro Region, such as Mami Wata narratives conveyed across Africa and the Atlantic, give horrific insights into morally problematic forms of wealth acquisition through environmental destruction. This paper approaches farmers’ stories of water spirits and water management practices as indices of farmers’ witness to their own social displacement by government-backed agribusinesses. Analysis shows that farmers are drawn to, and are already part of, a system that waits and watches for their death. As perverse as many forms of necropolitics can be, this form of social devivification, duplicitously advanced in the name of environmental conservation and sustainability, is all too familiar and ordinary. This article unveils agro-industrial conceits about water management and contrasts these conceits to farmers’ life-sustaining practices.

How Can You See in the Dark Part II Mapping

Part of my current Blue(s)Print poetic practice, this piece was written after attending a friend's Nichiren Buddhism conference and then later attending Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative’s black/water: The Digital Ceremony. The shape of the poem's maps are inspired by the Angaria Delphinus shell I received recently, thinking about the connections to the Delphi Oracles, Sibyls, and Mami Wata priestesses. I want this piece to represent the Sux within language and history, and that language can be a meditative, spiritual guide and gate opener to the vast history and connections of the diaspora. Is what we think of as lost really lost or just transformed and in constant motion?

Little Rattle Stilt

68 SARAH MINOR Little Rattle Stilt • “Is it John? Ron? Is it Adam? Casper? Binx? Is it Waverly? Xavier? Sylas?” So went on the meantime queen, the miller’s maid, pretty as a grape. “Tell me baby, what’s my name?” “Is it Spiderlegs? Muttonchop? Pearstalk? Is it Melichor? Balthazar? A year prior, near to the day . . . Three was the king, the miller, his daughter. Twowereherovertqualities:indolence&beauty. One was the lie her father boasted, meant as a simile: drawn as straw is to golden hair. The king put her in a tower round as the wheel. “I’ll have straw spun to gold by morn or your dish­ water head.” The work-shy daughter wept, of course, huge aquamarine tears. Tears to fill every lampshade in this castle and the next. Mercy, mercy, the mankin came—a waggish goblin, ugly as an artichoke—through a door in the tower previously invisible to her. “Oh miller-maid-futurequeen , why are you weeping?” asked the imp. “Yes, I spin.” Her pearl necklace for the job. Jesus, take the wheel. And whoosh! In three turns the spindle was full. All at once, it was sunrise, and the king came creaking through the regular door. Three times the size, her second tower of straw. Two the number of empty spindles. One was the name of the helper who came, treading, licking, twisting, this time for her ring. 69 Is it Hipche? Heinrich? Spindleshanks?” This, the third day of her guessing. “Nay,” refrained the goblin, “that is not my good appellation.” “Is it Cruikshank? Slinger? Is it Accident? Arachne? Botticelli? Is it Wahlverwandtschaft? Is it Suzuki?” Ass name by name [she] called the roll. “Mistress Beauty, these are not my name.” “Is it Whuppity Stoorie? Rhiannon? Jolene? Cecilia? Lola? Roxanne? Is it Mami Wata? Is it Beezlebub?” The game repeated thrice. Next morn, the last tower was locked. At sunrise, the king said, he would marry her! She wept two pails of seawater. Poor grape. “And what will you give me now?” the goblin asked the lass. “Myself!” she told the imp. “Nay,” it replied. “I bear no seed. Instead, promise me thy first little child.” The flour girl paused. A name and no one to carry it. Who knows what will happen in the end? Is the length of each limb brief as its memory? Whoosh! The otiose girl agreed. She bred within the year, and on that anniversary , mother’s little helper returned to stake its claim. The new babe, it resembled a toe. Its breath blew bubbles. Still, the miller-queen would not hand it over. The patient imp gave a final instruction. Mercy, mercy, three days to guess its name. A name is not magic, but rather, contains it. He who must not be. Say their names. So it is not magic but language that makes something exist. The spaghetti is worms. 45. Open Sesame! The eve before the imp’s return, the girl confessed all to her husband, but the killer-king could not believe the skill was never hers. True, none but the maid had seen the goblin. And who was the creature? Her other half? A stranger, still? Before spoken words were written there were notches, palm seeds, lists. The queen’s list was limitless. Her face bloated green, sick with the coming loss. In Western practice, the diagnosis of an illness is one-half naming; the other half is the antidote, drawn to each name like a magnet. Among psychotherapists, the naming itself is the cure, and the medicine a winding search for language. Among botanists, plants have names divided into two parts, like Solomon’s child. The first, 70 By now the imp had grown excited. Hopping on one leg, it said to the babe: “Deny thy father!” And to the maid: “They call me ‘Hell.’ They call me ‘Stacey.’ . . . That’s not my name! That’s not my name!” The slovenly girl: “Perhaps your name is . . .” its family name; the second, its species, which is how we all learn our poisons. So it was I, the accountant—hobby herbalist—the only soul to share her tower that long year, who the maid sent to follow...

Blood in the Water: Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic as Children’s Petrofiction

Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic (2015), written in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, deliberates the special problem of talking to children about oil. How does one tackle the subject of oil when addressing young people? How are children enabled to participate in discourses on petroleum? The novel also reveals a dilemma: the resource that we associate with comfort and progress actually contaminates, wounds, and lays waste to natural and human ecosystems. Caught in the mucky conundrum of oil, Bayou Magic reveals the challenges of talking to children about oil and oil catastrophes. In striving to meet the expectation that children’s fiction should offer a hopeful, if not happy, ending, Bayou Magic resorts to a resolution that “contains” the oil spill but sidesteps the problem of our persisting dependence on oil. But the novel’s allusion to the African deity Mami Wata is significant, as the figure connects the oppression of Black peoples to the exploitation of natural resources. As such, the novel uses fantastical elements not to imply that only something magical or divine can save us from disaster; rather, it signals that projects of environmental justice require openness to and embrace of radically imaginative solutions.

The Lone Hut: Migration, Identity, and Twinship in Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers

Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once described The Swamp Dwellers as an exploration of economic displacement and cultural disruption resulting from the pillage of natural resources by colonial governments and international corporations. Soyinka set his play deep in the Niger Delta, a place of dense mangrove swamps and the folkloric Mami Wata—a half-human, half-fish seductress, to highlight the environmental degradation and lost livelihoods of the Yoruba, Ogoni, and other indigenous peoples. By focusing on a handful of characters who inhabit or pass through a small hut built by Makuri and Alu, an impoverished elderly couple eking out an existence in the heart of the swamp, Soyinka reveals how migration and acculturation erode traditional values and reshape identity in ways that encourage avarice and self-interest over family and community, promote political and economic corruption, and accelerate the replacement of indigenous belief systems with the depersonalized transactional values of commerce and trade.

Genetic diversity of the Colombian Creole donkey in the Department of Sucre

The objective of this study was to evaluate the genetic diversity of the Colombian Creole donkey in the Department of Sucre using Random Amplified Microsatellites (RAM) molecular markers. In 100 individuals from the five subregions of the department, DNA was extracted and five RAM primers were amplified by PCR. In all, 291 bands were found, on average 11.96±1.45 per primer, the highest value in CCA (18±2.23) and the lowest in TG and GT (8.8±0.44). CA was the most polymorphic primer (88.09±10.91%) with the highest heterozygosity value (He) (0.376±0.021), while the lowest was GT (0.341±0.076 and 0.101±0.040, respectively). Intrapopulation analysis showed an average of 66.50±1.72 bands, of which 89.86±24.04% were polymorphic. The highest number of bands (63±3.84) was found in the Gulf of Morrosquillo (GO) subpopulation, and the lowest in Mojana (MO) (48±2.88); however, the highest value of polymorphic loci (81.16%) and He (0.335±0.022) were found in the Montes de María (MM) subpopulation, making it the most diverse. The average genetic diversity for the entire population was 0.351±0.021 bands. The population structure analysis showed a 10% variation between subpopulations, with an FST value of 0.17±0.01 (P<0.05). Genetic distances between subpopulations showed that MO and GO were the most distant. The RAM markers are effective in assessing the genetic diversity of the Creole donkey, which has high values of genetic diversity, particularly the MM subpopulation. The genetic revealed structure could be the result of natural geographical barriers between the subregions.

Tristan Strong Destroys the World by Kwame Mbalia

Reviewed by: Tristan Strong Destroys the World by Kwame Mbalia Alaine Martaus Mbalia, Kwame Tristan Strong Destroys the World. Rick Riordan/Disney Hyperion, 2020 [400p] (Tristan Strong) Trade ed. ISBN 9781368042383 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781368068024 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 4-7 A month has passed since Tristan Strong punched a hole in the sky, releasing an evil haint into the myth and folklore–populated world of Alke. Now a new foe, the powerful Shamble Man, has forced its way into Tristan's world and kidnapped his grandmother. To save her, Tristan reunites with old comrades and teams up with a few new ones, but there's more to the Shamble Man than anyone realizes, because this time the villain has a grudge against Tristan himself, and his actions may spell doom for all of Alke's inhabitants. As dark history leaches poison into the waters and the specter of the defeated haint rises in a new form, Tristan must choose between saving his friends and destroying their world forever. Mbalia returns with a sequel as impressive and even more compelling, offering all the power-packed goodness of the previous volume, with well-plotted pacing and a quick-witted narrative voice. Tristan may be a less reluctant hero this time, but he still grapples with his past deeds, the trauma he experienced, and his fitness for the role. Old favorites are also back, including the raft-piloting heroine Ayanna, scene-stealing Gum Baby, and Anansi, who crafts hilariously useful apps from his Story Box Phone prison. New figures like Keelboat Annie and Mami Wata, meanwhile, round out the cast with strong female-focused myth and folklore, and valuable new concepts are woven in, from storytelling quilts to the African diaspora. A stunning conclusion will leave readers breathless and eager for the next installment. [End Page 93] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Collections Care Challenges and Innovations for Ephemeral Altar Assemblages

This contribution evaluates the installation of (inter)active altar assemblages in museums from the underexamined perspective of collections care practice. Based on ethnographic research at the Fowler Museum at UCLA – which has been exhibiting altars for over two decades – this article investigates the details of constructing, maintaining, documenting and conserving altars. Firstly, it examines the Fowler’s innovative use of registration categories to contend with the fluid identities, status, and functions of individual altar components referred to as “TRs”, “Props”, and “Offerings”. Secondly, it offers a comparative analysis of curatorial and conservation documentation for three entire altars – one of which was also a contemporary artwork – in the 2008 exhibition Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas. This study reveals challenges of exhibiting ephemeral altar assemblages, provides examples of museological innovation to meet those challenges, and highlights the vulnerabilities of such innovations that museums should consider moving forward.

The disappearing Mammy Water myth and the crisis of values in Oguta, South Eastern Nigeria

Igbo value system is in crisis with an increase in crime rate, kidnapping, stealing, sexual immorality and divorce. Though several reasons have been given for this malaise, the influence of myths on value system has not been explored. To do this, we chose Oguta town in South-Eastern Nigeria, known for its belief and worship of Mammy Water. The intent is to verify if the disappearing myth has any adverse socio-cultural implications on the town. As the disappearing myth deals principally with the people’s life, the research methodology used historical as well as the descriptive phenomenological methods. These methods explain the phenomenon as it appeared in Oguta objectively from the historical point of view. One-on-one interviews and focus group discussion with the natives were carried out, thus making oral literature an important element of this research. It comprises three groups: the first group has the age bracket of 70 years and above; the second group has 40–69 years as age bracket and the last group has 20–39 years as age bracket. Efforts were made to distinguish meaningful facts from fictitious or emotional ideas expressed by the participants. Information was also gathered from published works. The research was able to identify the myth’s disappearance as a major contributing factor to the town’s crisis of values.

Intimate Objectivity: On Nnedi Okorafor's Oceanic Afrofuturism

This article presents a reading of Nnedi Okorafor's science fiction novel/petrofiction Lagoon (2016) in order to develop a theory of "intimate objectivity" in which marine biology calmly confronts the fantastic. Drawing on traditions in feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, Afrofuturism, and the ocean humanities, I show how Lagoon's intimate objectivity derives from its dual characterization of visiting aliens as coral reefs and Mami Wata deities. This double signification places Lagoon's aliens as mediators of both indigenous cosmologies and technological evolution, a necessary catalyst for imagining alternative futures distinct from the destructive elements of petroculture.

Sanctuary of the spirits: okwu-muo, Ori oke and 'mammy water' in the veneration of sacred natural sites in Southern Nigeria.

Sanctuary of the spirits: okwu-muo, Ori oke and 'mammy water' in the veneration of sacred natural sites in Southern Nigeria.