Anansi the Spider

Anansi the spider belongs to the Akan of Ghana, but Anansesem — "Ananse stories" — is a genre label rather than a spider's biography: the Akan give the name to folktales whether or not the spider appears in them, and the narrator opens by saying that the story is not true. The tale everyone repeats, in which Anansi pays the sky god for the world's stories, has no fixed text. The earliest printed versions disagree about the price. In the Accra collection of W. H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair (1917) it is a jar of live bees, a boa-constrictor and a "tiger". In the version Melville and Frances Herskovits typed down at the village of Asokore in Ashanti in August 1931 it is mmoatia, a serpent and hornets. The familiar four — Onini, Osebo, the Mmoboro and Mmoatia — come from R. S. Rattray's Ashanti collection of 1930, where Anansi's wife Aso plans every capture and he adds his own mother to the payment. The name crossed the Atlantic as a genre too: in Jamaica in 1816, Matthew Lewis wrote down four "Nancy stories" and not one of them has a spider in it.

Start with the word, because the word is not what this entry assumed. Anansesem means "Ananse stories", and among Twi-speaking Akan it names a whole class of narrative rather than a body of tales about a spider. Christopher Vecsey's 1981 survey of the Akan trickster puts it flatly: "All Anansesem, whether they deal with Ananse or not, are considered to be untrue stories. They are not myths in any sense of the word." Anyone may tell them, though only at night or at a ceremonial occasion such as the funeral of a respected story-teller, and before he begins "the narrator will say that the story is not true". The tale in which Anansi obtains the sky god's stories is the one that travels, and it is nearly always told as though it were a single fixed text. It is not. Listing the printed versions in 1981, Vecsey wrote that Ananse captures "hornets, a python, a leopard, and other animals according to different versions" — and the earliest printed versions I have been able to read disagree with one another about the price. The oldest of them is also the frankest about its own unreliability. West African Folk-Tales, collected and arranged by W. H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair (London: George G. Harrap, 1917), opens at page 29 with "How We Got the Name 'Spider Tales'". Barker is described on the title page as "formerly principal of the Government Institution, Accra", and the introduction explains that the government's new education policy had provided a Training Institution for Teachers there; the tales came from its first intake, experienced schoolmasters from various districts. The introduction explains the method without embarrassment: "By obtaining from these students a variety of versions of the same story it became possible to some extent to eradicate the superfluous and the spurious." It closes with "an apology to the scientific folk-lorist", because "the stories have been retold in order to appeal to a wider public". In that retold version Anansi is merely conceited, wants the tales renamed after himself, and Nyankupon sets three conditions: a jar full of live bees, a boa-constrictor and a tiger — the book's own footnote glossing "'Tiger' in West African stories is a leopard". There is no fairy, no python named Onini, no wife and no mother. The version taken closest to an actual telling is the one Melville and Frances Herskovits recorded in the village of Asokore, in Ashanti, during August 1931, from residents of Asokore and the near-by settlement of Effiduasi, and published as the first item of "Tales in Pidgin English from Ashanti" (Journal of American Folklore 50, 1937, pp. 52-101). They typed the tales as they were spoken, partly because the storyteller "is so fascinated by watching the play of the mechanism as seen through the back of the typewriter that he quite forgets any embarrassment". Their deepest debt, they wrote, was to their interpreter Charles E. Donkoh. Here the price is again three things, and again not the four everyone quotes: mmoatia, the "small people" of the bush who make magic; inini, the serpent; and 'mobro, which the narrator glossed as ants and which the editors correct, citing Rattray, to hornets. The same collection carries a second version from the same village in which Anansi catches the mmoatia with a carved wooden figure smeared in rubber gum — the tar-baby, which Barker had already pointed to in 1917 as the ancestor of Brer Rabbit's. The four named creatures this entry listed — Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, the Mmoboro hornets and Mmoatia the fairy — belong to R. S. Rattray's Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), where the tale is number 17. I have not been able to read those pages directly, and say so rather than pretend otherwise. Herskovits cites them as pp. 55-59 and corrects his own narrator's translation against Rattray's page 55; Vecsey cites pp. 54-59. Both report what our entry had dropped: in Rattray's version Anansi's wife Aso devises each capture, and Anansi throws in his own mother, Ya Nsia, on top of the price. Two women, edited out. The four-creature version reached general readers through anthologies — the text circulating online credits Paul Radin's African Folktales and Sculpture (Bollingen Foundation, 1952) — and above all through Gail E. Haley's picture book A Story, A Story (New York: Atheneum, 1970), which is where most English-speaking children still meet it. One more thing this entry asserted without qualification: that Nyame is "the sky god". In the older Gold Coast texts the name is Nyankupon or Nyankonpon, and Barker's 1917 introduction denied outright that he was an Akan god at all, quoting A. B. Ellis's The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa (1887, p. 24) to the effect that Nyankupon was the Christians' god, "borrowed from them and adopted under a new designation" by the towns near the European forts. That is a colonial-era claim and later Akan scholarship rejected it; Vecsey treats Nyame as the Akan Supreme Being and sends the reader to J. B. Danquah's The Akan Doctrine of God. The dispute is part of the record, and it is worth more than the adjective we had. On the far side of the Atlantic the name travelled as a genre label too, and that is the most striking thing in the whole file. Matthew Gregory Lewis, an absentee Jamaican proprietor, wrote in his journal on 7 May 1816 that "the negroes are also very fond of what they call Nancy stories", and transcribed four of them. Not one contains a spider. He then set down the rule as he understood it: "It seems to be an indispensable requisite for a Nancy-story, that it should contain a witch, or a duppy, or, in short, some marvellous personage or other" — and distinguished them from the farcical trickster tales the enslaved called "Neger-tricks". A century later Martha Warren Beckwith opened Jamaica Anansi Stories (American Folk-Lore Society, 1924) with the same point: "To all such story-telling, as to riddling and song, the name of 'Anansi story' is applied, — an appellation at least as old as 1816, when Monk Lewis in his journal describes the classes of 'Nancy stories'". Beckwith worked with over sixty story-tellers in country districts of Jamaica during six weeks in the summer of 1919 and five in the winter of 1921, with Helen Roberts recording the music; among the predecessors she thanks is Pamela Smith, whose Annancy Stories (New York: R. H. Russell, 1899) supplies the drawing at the head of this page.

Anansi is not a place, and the pin on this page cannot mean what a pin usually means. What it can mark is a documented collection site: the village of Asokore, in the Sekyere East district of the Ashanti Region, where Melville and Frances Herskovits wrote down two versions of the story-purchase tale in August 1931 from residents of Asokore and neighbouring Effiduase, some 30 km north-east of Kumasi. There is nothing to see there — no monument, no museum, no marker. The point is worth marking only because a text was taken down there on a known date. To watch Anansesem performed rather than read them, the building made for it is the Kodzidan, the "story house" at Ekumfi Atwa in the Central Region, about 108 km west of Accra. Note that this is Fante country on the coast, not Ashanti. It grew out of the playwright Efua Sutherland's friendship with Nana Okoampah Baah IV, queen mother and chief of Atwa, who had broadcast Ananse stories on Ghana Broadcasting Corporation radio. Sources disagree on the year: the published chronology of Sutherland's life dates the Ekumfi Atwia Experimental Community Theatre Project to 1964; village oral tradition says the structure went up in 1966; former students of the School of Performing Arts at Legon say they attended performances there between 1963 and 1965. The two researchers who surveyed the building for a 2017 study settled on "the mid-1960s". It is an eleven-sided open structure with a storyteller's pit in front of a small stage, tiered seating, a low surrounding wall and two gates; those researchers put its capacity at roughly 300. It has hosted international programmes: the National Association of Black Storytellers of the United States performed there during the 2015 Pan African Historical Theatre Festival. A practical warning, and it matters more than an address. Performances at the Kodzidan are community events, not a ticketed attraction on a timetable. No opening hours and no admission price have been verified for this entry, and none should be inferred from the paragraph above. Approach the community, or the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon, before travelling. The cheapest visit of all is to the texts, which are online in full and free: Barker and Sinclair (1917) and Lewis's Journal (1834) at Project Gutenberg, and Beckwith's Jamaica Anansi Stories (1924) at Wikisource.