Also “Ananse,” “Anancy,” and “Nansi,” the spider trickster of West and Central Africa. Anansi is so popular a character in this great body of tales that, even when he does not appear, they are called Anansesem (Ananse stories) by the Akan-speakers of Ghana and the Côte d’Ivoire. Although Anansi usually has spider characteristics, to make matters even more complicated for scholars he can also turn into a human, and conversely, other animals such as a rabbit, a fox, and a hare sometimes take over his role in popular stories. Indeed, he was first known to most European Americans as the trickster Brer Rabbit in Joel Chandler Harris’ 19th-century literary retellings of African (and non-African) Uncle Remus stories. Although Anansi stories and other African tales have been collected and published since the first quarter of the 19th century, they reached a wider non-African audience through Cronise and Ward’s Cunny Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef (1903), Beckwhti’s Jamaica Ananst Stories (1924), and Rattray’s comprehensive collection, Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (1930). Known from Senegal to Angola in Africa, and throughout the African Diaspora in the Caribbean, northern South America, and the United States, Anansi is ‘Ti Malice in Haiti, Boy Nasty and B’Rabby in the Bahamas, Nansi in Curaçao, Aunt Nancy and Miss Nancy on the Carolina/Georgia Coast, and he can be a girl, a boy, or an old man or woman rather than a spider. In the Anglophone Caribbean, particularly Jamaica and Trinidad, his stories are often told as an entertainment during the overnight rituals associated with wakes for the dead; in Suriname, they are told only at night during wakes. Most commonly, Anansi is a wily, cunning spider with human abilities such as speech, who uses his insect characteristics such as his sticky web, his eight feet, and his ability to descend rapidly from a ceiling, to attain his goals or save his life. He plots and plans, using every kind of clever and amoral duplicity to satisfy his greed, but he is sometimes outwitted or bested by other animals. Some stories explain how spiders were created, while others feature Anansi as a kind of culture hero who steals the sun for humankind and tricks the sky god into giving him these stories. One of the most famous Anansi stories is how he tricked Tiger through cajolery, while pretending to be ill and weak, into letting him ride him complete with saddle, bridle, and whip. In another, a farmer catches thieving Anansi by putting a tar baby, or gumdoll, in his field. When the doll does not answer Anansi’s greeting, he slaps it and his hand sticks, then he kicks it when it won’t release his hand, so when the farmer catches him, he beats him flat, thus explaining how spiders came to be flat. Although many of the tales are adult in content, and far from edifying in their trickery, their tremendous range of character and action explains why they have kept their appeal and are constantly being “retold” by writers of children’s books. Even so, African American artist John Biggers, in Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa (1962), sees Ananse as depicting “…every kind of hero. There is an Ananse story for every situation in life. God gave Ananse the meaning of order.” Daniel J.Crowley
References
Bascom, William. 1992. African Folktales in the New World. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.