Introduction
This Storybook contains 100-word stories about four famous tricksters from different African traditions: Hare, Tortoise, Spider, and Mantis. There are other trickster characters beyond these four, but if you read through the stories of these four characters, you will get a good sense of African trickster figures in general who, in turn, were the origin of some famous tricksters in American traditions like Brer Rabbit and Brer Terrapin in the southern United States and also Anansi in the Caribbean.
There is no special order in which to read the stories; I hope you will want to read about all of them (the stories are very short!). So, just jump in with the character who intrigues you the most, and you will find buttons at the bottom of each page that will take you to the other pages.
Hare Stories. The trickster hare is famous in many different African cultures, and he has different names in those different cultures: sometimes he is Kalulu, or Sangura, or Zomo. The Hare stories on this page come from southern Africa and central Africa.
Tortoise Stories. The tortoise is especially famous as a trickster in Nigeria, where he is called Ajapa (or Ijapa), but you will also find trickster tortoise stories in many other African cultures. The Tortoise stories on this page all come from Nigeria.
Spider Stories. You may already be familiar with one name of the spider: Anansi (or Ananse). That is his name in the Akan language of Ghana in west Africa, and in the Hausa language of Nigeria, he is called Gizo. The Spider stories on this page come from Ghana and Nigeria.
Mantis Stories. The Mantis stories all come from the San (Bushman) peoples of southern Africa. The San languages have "click consonants" which are not found in other African languages, which makes the words difficult to represent in Roman letters. The Mantis is named |Kaggen which is also sometimes just written as Kaggen.