The Spider Who Bought the Stories

Nnamdi Okonkwo
Field Correspondent, The First Continent

Fieldnotes — Kumasi and the Ashanti forest edge, dry season

The word came up before I asked for it. I had been sitting with an elder in a compound outside Kumasi, waiting out the worst of the afternoon heat, when a child misbehaved and the old woman muttered something about Ntikuma's father teaching him tricks. I asked her to explain, and she looked at me the way one looks at someone who has never been told the obvious. Of course the stories belong to the spider, she said. Where else would they have come from.

The tale, as it is usually given, goes like this. Long ago all the world's stories belonged to Nyankonpon, the sky god, and were called by his name. Anansi, small and unimpressive next to the gods and beasts around him, asked to buy them. Nyankonpon set a price meant to be impossible: bring me Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, Mmoboro the hornets, and Mmoatia the spirit that cannot be touched. A weaker mind would have refused outright. Anansi did not refuse. He goaded Onini into stretching himself along a branch to measure his own length against a stick, then bound him fast under the pretence of helping. He dug a pit for Osebo and offered a false rope out of it, drawing tight the moment the leopard trusted him. He drenched a gourd in water during a false rainstorm and convinced the hornets to shelter inside it, then sealed the opening. Mmoatia he lured with a doll smeared in sticky gum, so the spirit's own curiosity trapped her hands. Four impossible things, delivered. Nyankonpon kept his word. The stories passed to Anansi, and from that day they are told as anansesem, spider tales, whether they are about the spider himself or not.

What struck me, listening again to versions of this in different mouths, is how little agreement there is on the smaller details, and how little that seems to matter to anyone telling it. In some tellings Anansi acts alone; in others his wife Aso or his son Ntikuma supplies the idea he takes credit for, which is its own kind of lesson about who does the work of cleverness and who claims it. The order of the four captures shifts. Sometimes there is a fifth task. The Akan storytelling tradition does not treat this as a problem to be settled, because the fixed part was never the sequence of tricks. The fixed part is the transaction itself, that stories were once the sole property of a god and became common property through wit rather than conquest, and that this is why a story, once told, cannot be owned again.

Anansi travelled hard, further than most tricksters manage. He crossed the Atlantic in the memory of the enslaved and put down roots in Jamaica, Suriname, the Carolinas and Georgia, sometimes under his own name, sometimes half-hidden as Aunt Nancy or Br'er Anansi, always keeping the same thin waist he earned in another story, the one where his own sons' ropes, pulled tight from four directions at once, cinched him into the shape spiders still have. He is not solemn. He is not always likeable. He cheats his own children on occasion and loses as often as he wins. But he is the reason, in Akan reckoning, that anyone gets to tell anything at all, and every storyteller who begins a tale in that tradition is, whether they say it aloud or not, still working with borrowed goods.

Nnamdi Okonkwo is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the First Continent. West African narrative as a living practice: spider tales, river deities, market gossip that hardens into legend within a season. He argues, persuasively, that treating any of it as antique is the fastest way to misunderstand it.