Anansi the Spider
The Akan trickster of West Africa who stole the stories of the sky god and carried them down to the people of the earth in his woven bag.
Long before the written page, in the forest villages of what is now Ghana, a small eight-legged figure crept into the household of the Sky God Nyame and walked out again carrying every story ever told. His name was Anansi — sometimes Ananse, sometimes Miss Nancy, sometimes just the Spider — and in the Akan, Ashanti, and wider West African imagination he is the keeper, the trickster, and the originator of stories themselves.
The tales of Anansi are not mere entertainment. They are a philosophy of wit, a survival manual for the powerless, and a comic charter for the inversion of authority. To follow the spider is to follow the thread that runs from the gold-mining towns of the Gold Coast to the cane fields of the Caribbean and the porches of the American South.
The Spider Who Brought Down the Stories
The most famous Anansi tale tells how stories themselves came into the world. In the beginning, Nyame — the Sky God, who lives above the clouds — possessed all the stories, and no human on earth had any. Anansi, his son by cunning rather than birth, climbed the long spider-thread up to the sky and begged for the stories. Nyame agreed, but only on impossible terms: Anansi must bring him Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, the Mmoboro hornets, and the fairy Mmoatia.
Anansi captured each by deception. He filled a gourd with water and tricked the python into thinking it was a pool, then bound him inside. He dug a pit for the leopard and covered it with leaves. He filled a calabash with water and floated it above the hornets’ nest, telling them it had rained through the roof. He trapped the fairy by smearing her tree with gum and pretending it was a relative’s misfortune. He delivered all four to Nyame, who honoured his word and handed the bag of stories to the spider. From that day, according to the Akan, every tale told on earth belongs to Anansi, and to the person clever enough to tell it.
This story is more than a myth of origin. It is a parable of how the small and seemingly weak can overcome the powerful by patience, humour, and the art of making the hunter become the hunted.
The Trickster’s Tools
Anansi is rarely described as a hero. He is vain, greedy, gluttonous, and lazy. He cheats his wife Aso, outwits the elephant, mocks the python, and is often punished as thoroughly as he triumphs. The Akan trickster tradition uses him as a mirror in which the village can see its own failings: a man who pretends to be a healer and is eaten by his patients, a man who hides in a jar of stew, a man who uses his own son as bait for a river-spirit and then is forced to rescue him.
The tales have a recurring moral shape. Anansi, or the human character identified with him, sets out to gain a great prize — wealth, a royal title, the hand of a chief’s daughter. Through a series of escalating deceptions, he comes close to success, and is then undone by his own pride or by an even cleverer trickster. The laughter of the audience is the point: it is the laughter of recognition.
The most celebrated of the moral tales include:
- Anansi and the Pot of Wisdom — Anansi collects all the wisdom of the world in a clay pot, intends to hoard it in a tall tree, and is told by his son to hang the pot in front of him rather than behind. He obeys, falls, and shatters the pot, scattering wisdom across the earth for all.
- Anansi as Teacher — A cycle in which the spider pretends to run a school, charges exorbitant fees for increasingly useless skills, and is finally exposed by the patient and observant pupil Ntikuma.
- Anansi and the Sky God — the foundational tale already described, retold in dozens of variations across the Akan and Twi-speaking world.
Anansi Beyond the Akan
The spider-trickster did not stay home. As the Akan, Ga, Ashanti, Fante, and other Gold Coast peoples were carried into slavery across the Atlantic from the sixteenth century onwards, Anansi travelled with them. In Suriname he became Anansi; in Jamaica he became Anancy, Nancy, or Aunt Nancy; in the coastal Carolinas and Georgia he became the most popular folk character among enslaved African-Americans, the teller of “Jack tales” and the trickster of Brer Rabbit’s own lineage.
In the Caribbean, Anancy absorbed local features. He acquired a wife, Sis Nancy, and a son, Kweku Tako. He sat on the veranda of the Big House and outwitted Massa. The very name became a byword for cleverness: in some islands, a particularly cunning woman is still called “a real Anancy.” His survival in this new world is one of the most striking examples of African folklore crossing the Middle Passage and remaining recognisably itself.
Scholars such as Trudier Harris and Roger Abrahams have traced the deep kinship between Anansi and the Brer Rabbit of the American South, who — through the filter of Uncle Remus, Joel Chandler Harris, and later Disney’s Song of the South — became the African-American face of the trickster for the wider world. The kinship is real: the bones of the stories are West African, even when the skin is a rabbit’s.
For comparison, the spider-trickster has clear cousins elsewhere. The Coyote of the Navajo and other Plains peoples plays a very similar cultural role in North America, walking the line between creator, fool, and shameless schemer. The Loki of the Norse myths and the European fox-cycle share the same appetite for transgression.
Anansi in the Modern World
In 1999, Ghana’s national postal service issued a set of stamps featuring Anansi. In 2002, the BBC commissioned a children’s animated series, Anansi the Spider, drawing on tales collected by the Ghanaian educator Asare Konadu. The spider has appeared in graphic novels drawing on West Indian and West African traditions, in the South African novel The Famished Road (1991) by Ben Okri — whose protagonist Azaro is a spirit-child in dialogue with the Anansi cycle — and in a 2011 public-health storytelling project that used Anansi tales to teach HIV awareness across the Caribbean.
The spider has also become a symbol of African and African-diasporic cultural pride. In the United States, “Anansi” appears in the names of schools, theatres, and reading programmes. In Ghana, he is the official mascot of the national cricket team. In the storytelling festivals of the West Indies, the opening phrase of an Anansi tale — “Weh yuh wan fi hear, anancy tell it” — is still the traditional call of the storyteller.
Sources and Further Reading
- Rattray, R. S. Anansi and Other Stories from the Gold Coast (1930). Oxford University Press, 1969.
- Wilks, Ivor. One God, One Man: The Asante Boy Who Saved His People. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
- Cotterell, Arthur. Encyclopedia of World Mythology. Lorenz Books, 2000.
- Gershoni, Yedida K., and Handel, Peter. The Storyteller: Anansi and the Kente Cloth of Ghana. Continuum, 2010.