Anansi Trickster Stories

What is Anansi? 

As a trickster who occupies the liminal space between the human and spiritual worlds, Anansi's role is to oppose and thwart the gods, including Nyame the Sky God, often resulting in chaos and misfortune for both humans the gods (Marshall 36-37a; Wickersham).

Trickster stories can be found in cultures around the world, featuring themes that emphasize cultural conceptions of morality, spirituality and religion, and the spreading of intergenerational knowledge. ( Britannica )

However despite his destructive and chaotic nature, his title of “Ananse Koroko” or “Great Spider” indicates that he still maintains high status among the Africans and African diasporas who share his stories (Mbiti, 1969, p 51; Marshall 1).

The Many Names of Anansi

Due to the tendency towards oral storytelling, variety in spelling is common (Marshall 5b)

Navigate a map of Anansi Trickster Stories connected between West Africa and the Caribbean by clicking here

Practice: Anansi Trickster Stories


Although these stories have spread with the movement of the African diaspora, they originated with the Akan people in Ghana, West Africa; specifically the Asante (Ashanti) people (Wickersham). Formerly named the Gold Coast by British colonizers, Ghana is often referred to under this name in documentation about the Transatlantic slave trade (Marshall 1a)

This map demonstrates that Anansi stories are prevalent in West African nations such as Togo, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The stories traveled with people to the Caribbean via the Transatlantic Slave Trade, primarily from the Asante people in Ghana to Jamaica (the green geo tags indicate this relationship between Ghana and Jamaica)

Although these stories have spread with the movement of the African diaspora, they originated with the Akan people in Ghana, West Africa; specifically the Asante (Ashanti) people ( Wickersham ).

Reflecting cultural practices and notions of spirituality, these stories were transmitted orally after nightfall in storytelling circles, often in Akan language “Twi” (Marshall 33-34a).

Further on in this database, you will find transcriptions of Anansi stories in the original Twi, accompanied by illustrations made by members of the Ashanti, Fanti, and Ewe tribes, as documented by R.S. Rattray in his primary source book Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales (Rattray 1930).

Listen to Jamaican scholar and author, Ms. Lou tell the story "Anancy and the Yellow Snake" below: 

Power, Politics, Values, and Culture

POWER AND POLITICS

In the Asante kingdom and culture in Ghana during the 1920s, Anansi stories were a socially acceptable method to communicate discontent with powerful people, as the community valued discussion towards conflict resolution, rather than violence. R.J Rattray addresses how “disgraceful” versions of Anansi were performed in evening storytelling sessions to expose misconduct, emphasizing the significance of oral communication and performance in this community. The stories serve to induce resolution, diffuse negative emotions or tensions into laughter rather than resentment, and act as a medium for negotiation. (Rattray, 1930, p. x; Marshall 33a)

To regulate the practice, legitimize the mockery, and protect storytellers, there were 2 primary rules to be followed when criticizing a chief, fellow villager, or even the King of Ashanti. (Marshall 34a)


“If one had a grievance against a fellow villager, a chief, or even the King of Ashanti, to hold him up to thinly disguised ridicule, by exposing some undesirable trait in his character – greed, jealousy, deceit – (they could) introduce the affair as the setting to some tale. A slave would thus expose a bad master, a subject his wicked King. Up to a point the story teller was licenced” (Rattray, 1939,p. xi) (Marshall p 33 - Liminal Anansi) 


CULTURE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Anansi offers social, ethical, and moral lessons that serve as the core of many Akan cultural responses to society (Britannica). In particular, Anansi represents Asante values and social structure by depicting contrasting attitudes of order and chaos (Marshall 37a). He simultaneously acts as a force of destruction and creation, of mayhem and order, due to his liminal position between human and non-human worlds, and due to his tendency to invert all social rules (Marshall 37a).


When it comes to representing order, Anansi reveals the Asante understanding that there can be no pure centrifugality. Just as the turning of the centre creates movement away from the centre, so Anansi’s movement away from order creates order. He shows the power of liminality precisely by stressing its negation of ordinary structure’ (Pelton, 1980, p. 36) (Marshall 37a).


When it comes to representing chaos, Anansi’s behaviours include disconnecting his body parts, eating his children, abusing his guests, ignoring the truth, and stealing from the sky-god Nyame. (Marshall 37a).


In addition, Marshall writes about how Anansi’s liminality helps represent his contrasting values of order and chaos. Alongside the human and spirit world, Anansi exists in the Asante ‘midden’; the liminal in-between space between the human and spiritual world. Mimicking the role of that ‘midden’, his character is depicted as an intermediary of life and death, nature and culture, and the spirit world and human world. His stories are symbolic of this ‘midden’, in part because they celebrate a cyclical > linear approach to life by linking birth to date and exploring essence as a regenerative element (Marshall 37a).


Marshall also highlights how the idea of community is valued higher against individualism, through their depiction of Anansi as a loner; without friends or family, without community, and without obligations to others. The stories feature this character but demonstrate and uphold the orderly, cooperative, communal society which is a tenant of the Asante culture (Marshall 37a).


It was precisely by testing the limitations of Asante moral code and by acting utterly opposite to the conditioned forms of human behaviour, Anansi was able to set and strengthen hierarchical Asante social structures. He became a re-creative force, by challenging the structure of Asante society with his liminality, but simultaneously reaffirming it. This force of chaos ultimately brought about an improved social order. However, while Anansi tested the boundaries of the Asante society’s system and reinforced their social rules, in the Jamaican plantation context he symbolically destroyed the enforced/abhorrent social order imposed by the European slavers (Marshall 37a).

Anansi’s roles/characteristics (Marshall 32a): 

Who was R.S. Rattray?


R.S. Rattray headed the Anthropological Department of the Asante capital Kumasi during the 1920s; a department that he founded to conduct research on the Asante people and culture. His writing contributed to the early body of 20 th  century European writing on the matter through methods that included ethnographic research, in which he would visit remote Asante villages, observe their evening storytelling sessions, identify the tales he considered the ‘best’, have the storyteller repeat it to him the next day, and rewrite them in Twi and English with minimal editing. (Marshall 32a)

 While his work is presented as being cognizant of his position as a European scholar reproducing Asante cultural practices in their original form, it introduces discussions about the construction of archives.

How Kwaku Ananse (The Spider) Got Aso In Marriage - P.133-137 from Rattray’s “Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales”.pdf

How Kwaku Ananse (The Spider) Got Aso In Marriage - P.133-137 from Rattray’s “Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales”

The Elders Say, “Be It Your Kinsman, Or Husband, Or Any One At All Who Has Work To Do, If He Ask You, Help Him” - p.141-145 from Rattray’s Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales.pdf

The Elders Say, “Be It Your Kinsman, Or Husband, Or Any One At All Who Has Work To Do, If He Ask You, Help Him” - p.141-145 from Rattray’s Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales

Philip Sherlock in West Indies, offers a description of how Anansi sounds when speaking, or how storytellers may have been acted out his character; “ ‘Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes Yes,’ said Anansi with that strange, soft lisp of his. He pronounced ’s’ like ‘sh’, and spoke in a high-pitched voice.” (Sherlock 60)

Ghana to Jamaica - Journeying Along the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Difference between Ghanaian and Jamaican versions of Anansi stories

In Jamaican Anansi tales, there are a few key differences from the Ghanaian origins. 

In doing so, stories would focus more on how an enslaved person used Anansi tactics to survive and resist, including finding ways to do less work, eat more food, trick and steal from Massa, and generally prioritize strategy and trickery in their resistance. These changes demonstrated how the culture and spirits of the victims of slavery could not be destroyed by slavery throughout Jamaican history. The stories instead operated as parables of survival, often depicting situations where the weak could prevail over the strong. 

Caribbean Newspapers archive has newspapers that mention Anansi stories from around the world (Río Piedras, P.R; Kingston, Jamaica; Mona, Jamaica; Manitoba, Canada; Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Tunapuna, T&T; Nassau, Bahamas; Miami, Florida).

Abeng Newspaper (Vol. 1, No. 15 May 10th, 1969), Kingston, Jamaica. Page 1-3

Limitations of the Archive


Oral Storytelling: One of the major limitations of the textual archive is that Anansi stories are traditionally transmitted orally. By only reading the stories in their written & transcribed form, readers lose the expressions, pauses, and drama that are present in an oral performance of the tale. Thus, they hear a 2D version of what can be considered a 3D story. 


Language and Transcription: A second key limitation of the archive is that many of the stories are preserved in translated English, as opposed to the original Twi. Resultingly, the meaning of the story is determined by the interpretation of the translator,

Beckwith - Jamaica Anansi Stories.pdf

Jamaica Anansi Stories

Martha Warren Beckwith

Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales by R.S. Rattray.pdf

Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales [Preface, Note on Illustrations, Contents]

R.S. Rattray

How is “what is missing” made absent and patrolled? The Theory of Absence, as explained by contemporary scholars, writers, and thinkers of the Black Transatlantic:

Hartman - Venus In Two Acts (Available Online).pdf

Venus in Two Acts - Saidiya Hartman

In Venus in Two Acts, Hartman introduces the methodology of Critical Fabulation, which combines archival and historical research with critical theory and fictional narrative in order to make sense of gaps in the records, and demonstrates a “scholarly way of writing about archival silences that explicitly draws on fictional techniques.” (Princeton University Library). 


Abstract: In “Lose Your Mother”, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history. // The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger—torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way and with figures from the past whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a "landmark text" (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).

Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana - Bayo Holsey

In Routes of Remembrance, Holsey focuses on how the memories of the slave trade are constructed by local residents and government tourism efforts, and the competing attitudes towards remembering a history of slavery (Venkatachalam). Holsey approaches the subject from ‘within the geographies provided by theories of postcolonialism as well as those provided by theories of the black Atlantic’ (Holsey, p. 14), and thus argues that conflicting discourses are produced from the spatial and temporal displacements of information on the slave trade. (Venkatachalam) 


Abstract: "Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic?


Routes of Remembrance tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade’s absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the country’s classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities.


Holsey’s study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory." (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo5519143.html)

A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging - Dionne Brand

Along with the theme of the diaspora, Dionne Brand also alludes to a new form of archiving, which scholar Erica Johnson elaborates on in her article “Building the Neo-Archive: Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return” (2014). The neo-archive is the creation of an archive of postcolonial writers-mainly of creative and personal forms, and Johnson also suggests the idea of memory work, in which the author/scholar includes their own memory, or memories of others (generational) into the historical archive. Johnson writes, By neo-archive, I refer to fiction that creates history in the face of its absence. Unlike historians, writers of fiction can fully enter the conditional tense to which Lowe alludes-and what is more, they can merge the conditional with the present through poetic explorations of archival gaps. Brand does this in her first two novels. (Johnson 2014).

Imperial Intimacies - Hazel Carby

In Carby's memoir Imperial Intimacies, she draws from Anansi stories to depict the migration of bodies and stories, in reference to her Jamaican and British family. The motif of the web draws on the convergence and division experienced by diasporas in movement, the popularity of Anansi tales across the Atlantic and even beyond Afro-Caribbean groups, and the enduring and resilient qualities of a web. (Gandhi)


She says, "The architecture of this tale has the tensile strength of a spider’s web spun across the Atlantic: spinnerets draw threads from archives, histories and memories, joining the movement of men from Britain during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the flood of volunteers that left the Caribbean to travel to Britain during the Second World War; the radial fibres that hold rural England and rural Jamaica in tension link the Atlantic port cities of Bristol and Kingston. Orphan threads have been left broken because I do not know how they should connect. Though I am unable to make these repairs the web weathers and holds.”... "Our go-to metaphor of roots implies primary ancestry. It invites us to extrude differences, in the service of future completion. Yet the web’s layout, and our social arrangements, are not determined a priori. Many shapes are possible." (Gandhi)

View more of the maps and image carousels below, including side-by-side English-Twi story translations: 

Works Cited

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