Who Is Anansi? The Spider Who Bought All the Stories in the World

Anansi belongs to the Akan peoples of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and his name is simply the Akan word for spider. He is a shape-shifter, appearing as a spider, a man, or a man with spider legs, and he lives with his wife Aso and their children in a village of animals who are also people. Kwaku Anansi, as he is formally called, is not a god, though he is the son of Nyame in some tellings, and he is not a hero. He is a trickster: the figure, found in almost every mythology, who lives by wit against the strong, breaks the rules everyone else keeps, and is as often the victim of his own cleverness as its beneficiary. Loki, Hermes, Coyote and the rabbit of the American South are his cousins.

The stories, anansesem, were told in the evening by the fireside, with the teller opening by disclaiming any truth in what followed and the audience interrupting with songs. They explained things: why spiders have thin waists, why the moon is in the sky, why wisdom is scattered among all people rather than kept by one, and, in the story of the box, why there are stories at all.

The most famous tale is the one about the price. Anansi went to Nyame and asked to buy his stories, and the sky god laughed and named his fee, four creatures nobody could catch. Anansi caught them all by the same method, which was to know what each one wanted to hear:

• •Onini the python he tricked by arguing aloud with his wife about whether the snake was longer than a branch, so that the python stretched himself along it to prove he was, and was tied there
• •Osebo the leopard he trapped by digging a pit in its path, and when it fell in he offered to help it out and bound it as he did
• •The Mmoboro hornets he caught by sprinkling water on them and on himself, telling them it was raining, and inviting them into a dry gourd, which he corked
• •Mmoatia the fairy he snared with a doll smeared with sticky gum, which the fairy slapped when it would not answer her, and stuck to

Anansi wins that time, but in most of his stories he loses. He tries to keep all the wisdom of the world in a pot and, unable to climb a tree with it on his front, is told by his small son to carry it on his back; enraged that a child knows something he does not, he drops the pot, and wisdom scatters to everyone. He tries to eat at every feast in the village at once by tying strings to his waist and having each host pull when the food is ready, and all the hosts pull together, which is why the spider's waist is thin. He fakes his own death to eat the crops alone and is caught by a gum-covered scarecrow, the story that reached America as Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. The moral is rarely stated and never simple. Anansi is punished for greed, but he is also the one who got the stories, and the tellers admire him even as they laugh at him.

Trickster tales are the stories of people without power. A small creature who outwits a leopard is a fantasy that the weak have always needed, and the stories say, without saying, that the rules of the strong can be got round and that intelligence is a kind of strength. Under slavery that message acquired an edge.

The Akan were among the peoples taken in largest numbers to the Caribbean, and Anansi went with them. In Jamaica, where the stories are most alive, he is Anancy or Brer Nancy, and his tales were told on plantations where a trickster who beat the master by wit was more than entertainment; folklorists have argued that Anansi was a figure of resistance, teaching the enslaved that survival could be won by cunning when it could not be won by force. He appears in Curacao as Nanzi, among the Gullah of South Carolina as Aunt Nancy, and his tricks were merged with those of Brer Rabbit, the hare trickster of other African peoples, in the tales Joel Chandler Harris collected in Georgia in the 1880s.

He has kept moving. Anansi is a character in Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods and its spin-off Anansi Boys, appears in Marvel comics as the first Spider-Man, and is told to Ghanaian and Jamaican children today in books and cartoons. The box was opened, and the stories got out.

The gum-covered figure that traps Anansi is one of the most widely told story ideas in the world, and folklorists have tools for studying stories like it. They collect versions from as many places as possible, note which details stay fixed and which change, and group them into tale types in standard catalogues. The sticky trap story has its own entry and turns up across West Africa, the Caribbean, the American South and beyond. An old Buddhist Jataka tale from India tells of a prince who strikes an ogre whose hair is sticky, and gets his hands, feet and head caught one after another in much the same way.

What folklorists still argue about is how such similarities arise. One explanation is diffusion: a story travels with traders, migrants and enslaved people, changing as it goes, which clearly explains how Anansi reached Jamaica. The other is independent invention, since any people who use sticky gum or sap to catch birds might imagine a trickster caught the same way. For the Caribbean tales the route is well documented, but for likenesses between African and Indian stories the question is harder, and each case is judged on how many specific details the versions share.

In Ghana the storytelling session itself became the model for a new kind of theatre. The playwright Efua Sutherland, who founded the Ghana Drama Studio in Accra in 1957, developed a form she called anansegoro, built on the evening tradition of anansesem, with a narrator who speaks directly to the audience and songs that listeners can join, as they would at the fireside. Her play The Marriage of Anansewa, published in 1975, has Ananse promise his daughter to four chiefs at once so as to collect gifts from each of them, and then scheme his way out of the trouble he has made.

In Jamaica the stories carried conventions of their own. Tellers traditionally close an Anancy tale with the phrase Jack Mandora, me no choose none, usually understood as the teller disowning responsibility for what has just been told, much like the Akan opening that disclaims any truth in the tale. Louise Bennett, the poet and performer known as Miss Lou, was central to bringing Anancy stories into print, radio and the stage from the 1940s onwards, telling them in Jamaican Creole at a time when many educated Jamaicans treated the language as something to be corrected rather than celebrated.

Among the Akan peoples of Ghana, the link between Anansi and storytelling is built into the language. Folk tales are commonly called Anansesem, spider stories, whether or not Anansi actually appears in them, which reflects the myth in which he wins ownership of all stories from the sky god. Storytellers traditionally open and close their tales with set phrases acknowledging that the story belongs to the spider.

Anansi has also found new life in modern fiction. Neil Gaiman's novel Anansi Boys, published in 2005, imagines the trickster god's sons in present-day London and Florida, and Anansi appears in Gaiman's earlier novel American Gods too. These retellings carry the spider's essential traits, cleverness, greed and a gift for talking his way out of trouble, into new settings, just as enslaved storytellers once carried him across the Atlantic.

Anansi is the spider trickster of the Akan people of Ghana, a small, greedy, clever figure who won the world's stories from the sky god by capturing a python, a leopard, a hornets' nest and a fairy through cunning, and who is caught out by his own schemes in most other tales. Carried to the Caribbean by enslaved Africans, he became Anancy in Jamaica and a symbol of wit against power, and his stories still explain why the spider's waist is thin and why wisdom belongs to everyone.