Anansi

All the stories in the world once belonged to the sky god. They were called Nyankonsem, sky god’s stories, and Nyame kept them. Many had tried to buy them. Kingdoms and warriors and wealthy men had all failed. Then Kwaku Ananse, the spider, came to Nyame and asked his price.

Nyame laughed. He named four creatures that no one had been able to capture: Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, Mmoatia the fairy, and Mmoboro the hornets. Bring me all four, said the sky god, and the stories are yours.

R.S. Rattray recorded this tale in Twi and English in his Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, published by the Clarendon Press in 1930. The tale is older than any written record of it. The captures that follow are the foundation of West African storytelling.

The Four Captures

Anansi’s wife Aso devised the first plan. Anansi cut a palm branch and some string, then went to where the python lived. He argued loudly, as if debating with his wife, about whether the python was longer or shorter than the palm branch. Onini overheard and, wanting to settle the matter, agreed to lie along the branch for measurement. He could not straighten himself completely. He consented to being tied to the branch to make himself perfectly straight. Once bound, Anansi carried him to Nyame.

For the hornets, Anansi filled a calabash with water. He poured some over a banana leaf held above his own head, and the rest over the hornets’ nest, calling out that it was raining. He pointed to the wet leaves and suggested the hornets shelter inside his dry calabash. The hornets flew in. He closed the lid.

For the leopard, he dug a pit on Osebo’s usual path. When the leopard fell in, Anansi appeared and offered help. He lowered his silk webs, binding the leopard while pretending to haul him out.

For the fairy, he carved a wooden doll and smeared it with sticky tree gum. He placed pounded yams in the doll’s hands and set it beneath the tree where the Mmoatia were known to appear. A fairy came, ate the yams, thanked the doll. No response. She slapped the doll’s face. Her hand stuck. She struck with the other hand. Stuck. She kicked. Stuck. This is the tar baby motif, one of the most widely distributed story patterns in the world, and this is one of its oldest documented forms.

Anansi delivered all four. Nyame accepted them and declared: from this day forward, all stories shall be called Anansesem, spider stories. The spider owned every tale anyone would ever tell.

The Spider

Anansi is a trickster, but a specific kind. He is cunning without being wise. He outwits through schemes, not through knowledge. He is greedy: many tales revolve around his attempts to hoard food or power. He is lazy: his wife Okonore Yaa toils on the farm while Anansi looks for shortcuts. He can shift between spider and human form depending on the story.

He is not consistently successful. Some tales end with his punishment or humiliation. He is duped as often as he dupes. Paul Radin, in The Trickster (1956), defined the type: “at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and is always duped himself.” Anansi fits precisely.

His full name is Kwaku Ananse. “Kwaku” is the Akan day-name for males born on Wednesday. Wednesday children are associated with cleverness and wit. The spider’s character is encoded in his birthday.

His position in Akan cosmology is debated. The supreme deity Nyame is sometimes called Anansi Kokuroku, “The Great Spider” or “The Great Designer.” This suggests the spider motif has cosmological roots older than the folk character. The scholar Anthony Ephirim-Donkor has argued that Anansi as a deity created the first inanimate human body and brought writing and agriculture to the earth. But mainstream Akan spirituality treats the folk Anansi and the cosmic spider as separate: the trickster of the stories is not worshipped as a god.

The spider’s web has its own symbol. The Ananse Ntontan, an Adinkra symbol with seven spokes from a central circle, represents wisdom, creativity, and the understanding that life has no simple answers. Adinkra symbols encode Akan philosophy in visual form, stamped into cloth, carved into wood, pressed into pottery.

The Failures

Anansi does not always win. The failures are as important as the victories.

In one tale, Nyame gathers all the world’s wisdom into a large pot and gives it to Anansi to distribute. Anansi decides to keep it for himself. He ties the pot to his chest and tries to climb a tall tree to hide it at the top. The pot blocks his arms and legs. He cannot climb. His young son Ntikuma watches from below and says: “Father, if you tied the pot to your back, your arms and legs would be free.” Anansi is so furious that a child is cleverer than the keeper of all wisdom that he hurls the pot to the ground. It shatters. Wisdom scatters to the four winds, and everyone in the world gets a small piece.

Another tale explains why spiders have a narrow waist. Two neighboring villages each invite Anansi to a feast on different days he cannot determine. He ties a rope around his waist and gives one end to each village, telling them to pull the rope when their feast is ready. Both feasts begin at the same moment. Both villages pull. The ropes squeeze Anansi’s middle tighter and tighter. By the time they finish, his waist is pinched permanently thin. Look at any spider and you can see where the rope cinched.

The Crossing

When enslaved Ashanti people crossed the Atlantic, they carried no possessions. They carried Anansi.

Jamaica received the largest concentration of enslaved Akan and Ashanti people in the Americas. The spider survived the passage and adapted. His name became Anancy in Jamaican Creole. His main adversary shifted from various animals to “Tiger” (Bredder Tiger). The stories became a contest between the clever weak and the powerful stupid, and everyone on the plantation understood the subtext.

Emily Zobel Marshall, in Anansi’s Journey (2012), describes the tales as “a form of mental training, illustrating tactics which could be implemented in the field.” The arts of cunning and disguise, spying and surveillance, hiding and subterfuge. Slave owners asked to hear the stories, entertained by them, not understanding that the audience was taking notes.

Martha Warren Beckwith, a student of Franz Boas and the first chair of folklore at any American university, collected Jamaican Anansi stories during fieldwork in remote districts in 1919 and 1921. She gathered tales from over sixty storytellers and published Jamaica Anansi Stories in 1924, the authoritative collection.

In Suriname, Anansi stories are called Anansi tori and remain part of Maroon death rites. Among the Maroons, escaped enslaved people who established free communities in the Surinamese interior, the tales stayed closest to their African spiritual origins. The nighttime-only rule persists: telling Anansi stories during the day brings the dead. In the Dutch Antilles, the spider became Kompa Nanzi (from compadre).

The question of Brer Rabbit is more complicated than it appears. Joel Chandler Harris collected his Uncle Remus tales in 1881 from stories he heard on a Georgia plantation. The trickster function is identical to Anansi’s: a small, weak creature outwitting larger, stronger animals. The tar baby motif appears in both traditions. But Marshall, in American Trickster (2019), argues that Brer Rabbit’s origins lie in Bantu-speaking regions of south and central Africa, where hare tricksters are widespread, not specifically in Akan spider traditions. Brer Rabbit is likely a convergence of multiple African trickster traditions that merged on American soil. In the Caribbean, Anansi kept his name and his spider form. In the American South, the trickster became a rabbit, and a white journalist claimed the stories as his own.

The Trickster Pattern

Anansi belongs to a pattern that spans cultures.

Eshu (also called Elegba), the Yoruba trickster, is the closest African parallel, but there is a fundamental difference. Eshu is a full orisha, a deity. His tricks serve a cosmic purpose: maintaining balance between the divine and human worlds. Without Eshu’s intervention, prayers cannot reach the gods. He is the guardian of the crossroads. Anansi’s tricks serve personal purposes: food, status, stories. Eshu crossed the Atlantic as well: he survives in Haitian Vodou as Papa Legba, in Cuban Santería as Elegua, in Brazilian Candomblé as Exu.

Coyote in Native American traditions is a similar amoral trickster who sometimes shapes the world through his failures. Loki in Norse mythology is a blood-brother to Odin whose tricks escalate from mischief to cosmic destruction. Hermes in Greek mythology steals Apollo’s cattle on his first day alive, then matures into the messenger of the gods. Each trickster reflects a different culture’s relationship with disorder. Anansi reflects the Akan position: disorder is where the stories live.

What Survives

In Ghana, Anansesem are still told, though the traditional evening storytelling under the village tree has declined with urbanization. The tales remain part of primary education and cultural identity. A digital initiative called Anansesem works to revive African folklore through technology.

In Jamaica, “Anancy story” in Creole English means a tall tale, an unlikely yarn. “You a tell mi Anancy story” means “you’re lying to me.” The spider’s name became the word for fiction.

In Haiti, Anansi is honored as a Guede Lwa, a spirit associated with death and fertility in Vodou practice. The folk character acquired religious status in the diaspora that he may never have held in Ghana.

Neil Gaiman gave him a suit and a fedora. In American Gods (2001) and Anansi Boys (2005), the spider appears as Mr. Nancy, an elderly Black man who tells stories and understands that stories are the only things that matter. Gaiman has said the seed was planted when comedian Lenny Henry asked where all the people of colour were in fantasy fiction. Gaiman turned to the oldest spider and found him waiting.

The storyteller’s opening formula in Akan tradition: “We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are going to say is true.” This is not a disclaimer. It is a door. The spider walks through it every night, somewhere in the world, and the stories that Nyame once owned follow him out.