Anansi is the best-documented spider in world tradition, and the documentation matters because he is frequently reduced to a generic trickster.
Anansi, Kwaku Ananse, belongs to the Akan peoples of what is now Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and the stories are anansesem, spider tales, a named genre with conventions of performance. The foundational story is an acquisition: Anansi buys the stories of the sky god Nyame at a price meant to be impossible, capturing the python, the hornets and the leopard by trickery, and thereafter all stories belong to him. That is why the genre carries his name.
He is small, weak and physically unimpressive, and he wins by wit against the strong. He also frequently loses, is exposed as greedy, and is punished; the tales are not straightforwardly celebratory, and several explain the origin of a defect in the world through his failure.
The Atlantic crossing is the crucial part of the history. Anansi travelled with enslaved Akan people to the Caribbean and the Americas, becoming Anancy in Jamaica, Nancy or Aunt Nancy in the Sea Islands and parts of the American South, Kompe Anansi in Suriname and Curacao. In those contexts the small clever figure who defeats the powerful acquired an obvious additional charge, and the survival of the cycle through enslavement is one of the clearest documented continuities between West African and Afro-diasporic culture. Jamaican Anancy stories were collected in quantity from the nineteenth century, and Anansi remains a living figure in Caribbean literature and children's publishing rather than a museum piece.