They took people from this coast and they took their names, their languages, their families and their gods, and they did not manage to take the spider.
Everywhere. This is the story the ships could not confiscate.
2 min readSource-backed story
Listening to Kwaku Ananse in the Americas
Kwaku Ananse in the Americas
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Kwaku Ananse in the Americas
They took people from this coast and they took their names, their languages, their families and their gods, and they did not manage to take the spider.
Ananse crossed. In Jamaica he became Anansi, and the stories are still told, and Jamaican patois calls a tall tale an "Anansi story." In Suriname he is Anansi in Sranan Tongo. In Curaçao and Aruba he is Kompa Nanzi. In the Sea Islands and the American South he became Aunt Nancy — the name worn down, the spider half-forgotten, but the trickster intact, and later merged into Br'er Rabbit, who is the hare of the savannah tales carrying the spider's job.
The mechanism is worth stating: Ananse is the weak one who beats the strong one by being cleverer, and he does it without a weapon, and he sometimes loses. There is no story better suited to people who have no power and cannot say so directly. The Tar-Baby that catches Br'er Rabbit is the sticky doll that caught the dwarf in story 12 — the same trap, four hundred years and one ocean later, with the roles reversed.
Every Ghanaian child knows Ananse. So does every Jamaican child. Neither is usually told that the other one does.
If you visit Ghana. Everywhere. This is the story the ships could not confiscate.
They took people from this coast and they took their names, their languages, their families and their gods, and they did not manage to take the spider.
Ananse crossed. In Jamaica he became Anansi, and the stories are still told, and Jamaican patois calls a tall tale an "Anansi story." In Suriname he is Anansi in Sranan Tongo. In Curaçao and Aruba he is Kompa Nanzi. In the Sea Islands and the American South he became Aunt Nancy — the name worn down, the spider half-forgotten, but the trickster intact, and later merged into Br'er Rabbit, who is the hare of the savannah tales carrying the spider's job.
The mechanism is worth stating: Ananse is the weak one who beats the strong one by being cleverer, and he does it without a weapon, and he sometimes loses. There is no story better suited to people who have no power and cannot say so directly. The Tar-Baby that catches Br'er Rabbit is the sticky doll that caught the dwarf in story 12 — the same trap, four hundred years and one ocean later, with the roles reversed.
Every Ghanaian child knows Ananse. So does every Jamaican child. Neither is usually told that the other one does.