Who Is Anansi? The Spider Who Bought All the Stories in the World
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Once there were no stories on earth, because the sky god Nyame kept them all in a box, and the price he asked for them was impossible: a python, a leopard, a hornets' nest and a fairy, delivered alive. A spider paid it, by tricks, and that is why stories are called spider stories in Ghana and why the spider who told them is Anansi. He is small, greedy, clever and usually caught out, and he has been the favourite character of West Africa for centuries and of the Caribbean since the slave ships carried him there.
The Akan spider
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.
How he won the stories
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
What the stories are about
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.
Across the Atlantic
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 takeaway
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.