Ananse (Anansi)

The best-known Ananse myth explains why stories themselves bear his name. In the tale, all the world's stories once belonged to the sky-god Nyame, and Ananse asked to buy them; Nyame set an impossible price, to capture a set of dangerous creatures, among them a python, hornets and a leopard, and Ananse, by wit and trickery rather than strength, caught each one and won the stories, so that in Akan a folk-tale is anansesem, "spider-words." This makes Ananse a culture-hero as well as a trickster: he brings the stories, and with them a kind of wisdom, to humankind.

As the study of West African tricksters emphasises, his cunning is double-edged, in countless tales he uses greed and deceit to outmatch stronger creatures, and about as often is undone by his own cleverness, and that ambivalence is the point, a figure who is at once spider and man, divine son of Nyame and earth, wise and foolish together.

Carried across the Atlantic in the transatlantic slave trade, Ananse became one of the most durable African survivals in the Americas. As Anansi he is a central figure of Jamaican and wider Caribbean folklore, and in parts of the North American South he appears as "Aunt Nancy." Scholars of the diaspora read his persistence as more than nostalgia: the trickster who wins by wit against the strong was a resonant figure for enslaved and colonised communities, a way of telling how intelligence outmatches force, and the Anansi story became a recognised form in its own right. He remains a living presence in Akan storytelling in Ghana and in the folklore of the African diaspora today, and appears now in children's literature and popular culture worldwide, a spider-trickster who travelled further than almost any other figure of West African tradition.

The fullest early written collection of the Anansi cycle is R. S. Rattray's Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (1930), transcribed directly from oral storytelling sessions in both English and Twi, though the tales themselves are far older than any manuscript record of them; an earlier, narrower documentation of Akan proverbial material appears in the missionary linguist J. G. Christaller's 1879 Twi Mmebusem. Central to the cycle is the story of how Anansi won the world's stories from the sky-god Nyame, who set him the task of capturing the python Onini, the leopard Osebo, the hornets Mmoboro and the fairy Mmoatia in exchange for ownership of the tales, thereafter called Anansesem, "spider stories," a myth that explains, within the tradition itself, why narrative authority belongs to the trickster rather than to the sky.