Anansi

← Encyclopedia

The evening meal is finished and the moon has cleared the compound wall, and in the swept courtyard of an Asante town a narrator clears his throat and begins by disowning everything he is about to say. We do not really mean, we do not really mean that what we are about to say is true. Only then may the tale come. Before it can gather any weight, the audience breaks in with a mmoguo — a sung interlude anyone present may raise, a song that suspends the story so the whole yard can clap and answer — and only after the singing subsides does the spider appear. When it is done, the narrator hands the tale back the way he took it: This is my story; whether it be sweet or not sweet, take some elsewhere, and let some come back to me. A proverb closes the night.

This is why a Ghanaian child calls every such story a spider story — anansesem, “spider tales” — even when no spider crawls through it. The genre carries the name of a single character because, the tradition holds, that character once bought all the stories there are. Kwaku Ananse, the spider, went up to the sky-god who owned them and paid a price no one had ever met, and since that day the stories have been his, and told under his name.

A carved Akan wooden doll of the akua’ba type, from Ghana, collected before 1930. via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The Wednesday-born spider

The full Akan name is itself a small biography. Ananse is simply the Twi word for spider; Kwaku is a day-name, the kra din or “soul-name” given automatically to a boy born on a Wednesday. Every Akan child receives one at birth according to the day of the week — Kwame for a boy born on Saturday, Kwabena for Tuesday, Yaw for Thursday — so the name Kwaku Ananse announces the trickster as a person before it names him as an animal: the Wednesday-born Spider, a member of the household with a birthday and a temperament, as much a man of the town as a creature of the eaves. He shifts between the two forms without friction. In one line he is spinning a thread from a high beam; in the next he is sitting down to a bowl of mashed yam with a wife and sons.

Those sons and that wife are fixtures of the cycle. Ananse’s wife is Aso, also called Okonore Yaa, and she is the quiet engine of many of his triumphs: it is Aso who works out the trick when Ananse has boasted his way into a task he cannot perform, and Ananse who takes the credit. His eldest son is Ntikuma, who apprentices in his father’s schemes and, as often, exposes or undercuts them, a younger cleverness pressing on an older one. The family is not decoration. The spider’s world is a domestic one, scaled to the compound and the cooking fire, and its comedy turns on appetite, marriage, debt, and the wish to be thought wiser and richer than one is.

He belongs to the Akan-speaking peoples of the forest belt of present-day southern Ghana and eastern Côte d’Ivoire — the Asante, the Fante, the Akuapem, the Kwawu, and their kin, whose shared language is Twi and whose shared body of tales is Akan to the root. Among them the whole oral-narrative genre is anansesem, spider words. The decisive point, recorded by the ethnographer who first set the corpus down in print, is that a story counts as anansesem whether or not the spider figures in it at all. A tale about a hunter, a chief, a river, or a foolish neighbor is still a spider story; the name has swallowed the genre.

That ethnographer is Robert Sutherland Rattray (1881–1938), the British government anthropologist stationed at Kumasi during the years of indirect rule, whose Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930) laid out seventy-five tales in Twi with facing English translation, illustrated by artists of the Gold Coast rather than by European hands. Rattray is the reason so much of this reaches the alphabetic record: the Akan kept no pre-contact writing, and the tales lived in performance — in the voice, the sung interlude, the closing proverb — until a colonial officer with a sympathetic ear and an official’s reach transcribed them. The debt is real and so is the difficulty: the tales survive in print because a colonial officer with an official’s reach wrote them down — in the language they were told in, but under the authority of the government he served — and the standard printed version of the story that follows is his.

How the spider bought the stories

In the beginning the stories were not on earth. They belonged to Nyame, the sky-god, gathered and kept beside him in the heights, and they were called by his name, not the spider’s. Ananse went up and asked to buy them. Nyame named a price meant to be impossible — a price, he said, that whole towns with their chiefs and elders had tried for and failed to raise. It was not gold. It was four living captures: Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, the Mmoboro hornets, and Mmoatia, the elusive dwarf of the forest. Ananse said he would bring them, and added his own aged mother and his wife to the wager for good measure. Nyame laughed at the little spider and agreed.

At home, Aso told him how. To take Onini, Ananse cut a long branch of palm and walked toward the python’s river arguing loudly with an absent wife — she says the python is longer than this branch, he says the branch is longer than the python — until Onini, offended, agreed to be measured, stretched himself the length of the palm, and was bound fast to it, tied along his own body. For the Mmoboro hornets he filled a calabash with water, poured some over himself and some into the nest, and cried out that the rains had come and they had best shelter from the flood; when the swarm flew into the dry gourd he stopped the mouth and carried them off. Osebo the leopard he took by digging a deep pit on the leopard’s path and covering it, so that the great cat fell in and could be lifted out helpless and bound.

The fourth capture is the strangest and the most consequential. To catch Mmoatia — a forest sprite, small and quick and impossible to hold — Ananse carved a little wooden figure, an akua, smeared it all over with sticky latex gum, and set in its lap a dish of mashed yam. The dwarf came, ate the yam, thanked the doll, and grew angry when the doll would not answer. She struck it — hand stuck; struck with the other hand — stuck; kicked with both feet, pressed with her body, until she was fixed to the gum from head to foot and Ananse strolled out to gather her up. This is the episode the wider world would later meet, transposed and renamed, as the Tar Baby: the trap that works by inviting the victim’s own temper to bind it.

Ananse carried all four to the sky, added his mother and Aso as promised, and laid the impossible payment at Nyame’s feet. The sky-god called his elders to witness that great chiefs had failed where the spider had succeeded, and made the decree that the whole tradition rests on: from that day the stories would no longer be Nyame’s stories but Ananse’s — anansesem — and would carry the spider’s name wherever they were told. The genre’s title is the receipt of a purchase.

Everything characteristic of the figure is present in that one tale. He is a culture-hero: he wins, for humankind, the very possibility of story, wresting it down from a sky-god who had hoarded it, and he does it by intelligence rather than force — the smallest creature in the bush outmaneuvering the python, the leopard, the swarm, and the sprite. But the same cunning, in the next tale, curdles into greed. Ananse is just as reliably a glutton and a cheat whose overreaching collapses on him: he swallows what he should have shared, claims a wisdom he then spills across the world, breaks a bargain and is beaten for it. The Akan pedagogy lives precisely in that second register — in the pleasure of watching the clever one undone by his own appetite. Children learn the shape of folly by laughing at the spider, not by being lectured; the comeuppance is the lesson.

A West African golden silk orb-weaver on its web. Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The framing of the telling matters as much as the content. Anansesem are performed, not merely recited: an evening genre, opened with the narrator’s flat disclaimer that none of it is true, punctuated by the audience-raised mmoguo songs that anyone may start and everyone may join, closed with the formula that sends the story off to come again, and rounded off with a proverb that fixes a point. Scholars of the tradition describe this scaffolding as the substance of the art — the performance techniques of the Akan folktale, the interplay of narrator and singing audience, are what make an evening of anansesem a communal event rather than a monologue.

That opening disclaimer also draws a hard line the tradition insists on. Anansesem are explicitly framed as not true — as entertainment and instruction, a licensed space in which the sky-god himself can be made a character, outfoxed by a spider, without irreverence. This is categorically different from sacred or liturgical speech. Where Akan religion addresses Nyame and the ancestors in libation and festival, the storyteller addresses the same Nyame as a figure in a comedy, and the disclaimer is what makes that permissible. Ananse is sometimes loosely ranked among the abosom, the lesser deities of river and force — the powers of which Tano the great river-god and Sasabonsam the forest ogre are more proper examples — but the Akan themselves treat the spider as folklore and delight, not as an object of cult. He receives no shrine and no offering. Whether that near-divine coloring makes him a marginal obosom or simply a very old story-being is a question the tradition’s own theology, not its folktales, is left to weigh.

The passage into Anancy

The tales did not stay in the forest. Carried in the memories of enslaved Akan across the Atlantic — Jamaica held one of the largest concentrations of enslaved Asante anywhere in the Americas — anansesem became, in captivity, a way of holding onto an African past and of asserting a self the plantation denied. The spider’s governing logic traveled with them and read differently on the far shore: the smallest and weakest creature defeating the largest and most powerful by wit alone is, among the enslaved, no longer only comedy but a covert lesson in survival and resistance, the weak outlasting the strong. The passage itself must be named plainly and without ornament. The Gold Coast was a heartland of the Atlantic trade, and it was through its castles and its long inland routes — the river of the last bath at Assin Manso among them — that the people who carried these stories were sold and shipped. The tales are what some of them kept.

The spider surfaces across the whole map of that dispersal, his name worn down but recognizable. He is Anancy in Jamaica and through the Anglophone Caribbean; Aunt Nancy or Sis’ Nancy in the folklore of the United States South, where the trickster is at times reimagined as an old woman; Anansi-tori in the Sranan Tongo of Suriname; Kompa Nanzi, or simply Nanzi, in the Papiamento of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire; and he is told, too, in Sierra Leone. The Wednesday-born spider of a Ghanaian courtyard became a diaspora-wide figure without ever quite ceasing to be himself.

His deepest mark on the folklore of the Americas runs through that fourth capture. The gum-smeared akua baited with yam, the trap that binds Mmoatia by her own blows, is a documented African antecedent of the Tar Baby. In the United States the African motif met an Indigenous one — the Cherokee “Tar Wolf,” a story of an animal caught by striking a tar figure, which the folklorist James Mooney recorded and which folklorists judge to be independently Native American rather than borrowed. The two streams fused in the Br’er Rabbit tales of the Uncle Remus cycle, where the trickster is a rabbit and the sticky snare is the Tar Baby, and the collision of African and Cherokee tradition is written into the plot. Ananse’s yam-doll is one of the tributaries of that river.

In Ghana the tradition never became a survival to be recovered; it stayed alive. Anansesem is still told, and it has climbed onto the modern stage as anansegoro, “spider drama” — a literary theatrical form built directly on the folktale’s structure of narrator, sung mmoguo, and participating audience, most influentially in the plays of Efua Sutherland, whose The Marriage of Anansewa turns the spider’s household comedy into a full drama. The spider feeds school readers, radio, and television; a Ghanaian childhood still runs on his misadventures.

Beyond the tradition’s owners, Ananse has been borrowed heavily, and the borrowing shades quickly into appropriation. Two American children’s books built careers on him — Gail E. Haley’s A Story, A Story (1970), which retells the purchase of the stories and won the Caldecott Medal in 1971, and Gerald McDermott’s Anansi the Spider (1972), a Caldecott Honor book. Neil Gaiman made him a modern deity in the novel Anansi Boys (2005) and in the character Mr. Nancy of American Gods. Marvel Comics retconned Kwaku Anansi into a “first Spider-Man,” a mythic ancestor of its superhero. The British rock band Skunk Anansie took half of his name in 1994. These are afterlife and appropriation, not Akan belief, and they are best held at that distance: cited as reception, never mistaken for the thing they draw on. A cartoon spider and a merchandised trickster are downstream of a figure who, in the courtyards where he began, still has to be summoned by a disclaimer and sung into the room.

That summoning is the durable thing. Somewhere tonight a narrator will warn that none of it is true, an audience will raise a song, and a small Wednesday-born spider will walk into a story that already bears his name — the price he once paid still keeping the whole genre in his debt.

→ Related: Nyame · Asase Yaa · Tano · Sasabonsam · Kumasi · Lake Bosomtwe · Boabeng Fiema · Assin Manso · The Akan · The Ashanti · The Fante · Akan Religion · Asante Empire · West African Vodun · Orisha Religion · Ifa Divination · Kingdom Of Dahomey · The Fon · Fon Cosmology Mawu Lisa · Dogon Cosmology