The media went agog of a potential mermaid (mammy water) sighting in Ibadan.
Several publications (not the Herald) reported that one Ramota Salawu, an Ibadan-based fish merchant saw a live mammy water in a carton of frozen fish.
The incident caused a lot of hoopla in the ancient Yoruba city and even a traditional ruler in the town and deities including the Osun river goddess were connected to the story.
However it turns out the woman and countless other people couldn’t differentiate between an octopus and what they thought was a miniature mermaid.
One Ibadan resident said, “We really do need to educate our people. A common subscription to DSTV could have provided her with access to the discovery channel, where she would have discovered about other sea creatures apart from fish”.
Here is an excerpt from a Tribune report on the incident:
According to him, “Ramota, his granddaughter, sells fried and roasted fish in the house and, as usual, purchased a carton of frozen fish that morning. She was in the process of cleaning the fish and separating those to be roasted from the ones to be fried when she was said to have screamed out loud and called on neighbours to come to her aid.”
Salau, a retired civil servant, said he heard people asking after him but rather than come upstairs to see him, the lady ran to meet her Shehu, an Islamic cleric, who followed her home and offered some prayers in the Islamic way before the neighbours, who had begun to converge on the scene, could take the pictures of the strange “fish.” The first person who took the picture of the strange fish was said to have had his phone shattered mysteriously.
Alhaja Alirat, a member of the community, told the Nigerian Tribune that she did not see the mermaid but the lady who claimed to have seen it, but declined to speak with the press, told her that the mermaid, though very small in size initially, grew bigger and was fish from waist downward and human being from waist upwards, with mouth, nose, eyes and long hair, which it was swinging to cover its eyes when the mammoth crowd thronged to the scene to look at it.