Anansi Obtains All the World's Stories

Before Anansi, there were no stories. Or rather — the stories existed, but they belonged to Nyame, the sky god, who kept them in a golden box in the sky. No one had ever purchased them. Many had tried and failed. The price was too high: the python Onini, the hornets of Mmoboro, the leopard Osebo, and the fairy Mmoatia who is never seen.

Anansi is a spider. He is small. He has no physical power. What he has is patience, ingenuity, and an almost theological commitment to thinking the problem through before acting.

He went to his wife first and told her the price. She helped him think out the strategies. Then he executed them, one by one, with the particular pleasure of someone who has already solved the puzzle and is simply doing the work now.

For Onini the python, Anansi went to him with a branch and a question: his wife claimed the python was not as long as the branch, but Anansi was sure he was. Onini, vain, lay down beside the branch to be measured. Anansi tied him. For the hornets of Mmoboro, Anansi filled a gourd with water and sprinkled it on himself and then on the hornets, announcing that the rain had come and they should shelter in the dry gourd before they drowned. They flew in; he stopped the opening with a leaf. For Osebo the leopard, he dug a pit, covered it with branches, and in the morning found the leopard trapped inside. He offered to help it out, made it climb a bent tree, and tied it fast. For Mmoatia the invisible fairy, Anansi carved a doll from wood, covered it with sticky gum, set it with a bowl of yam before the path the fairy walked, and waited. The fairy ate, thanked the doll, received no reply, and struck it — and stuck.

He brought all four to Nyame. The sky god looked at them — the serpent, the hornets, the leopard, the fairy — and said what he had never said before: The price has been paid. The stories of the world belong to you, Kwaku Anansi. From this day forward, they will be called spider stories.

The Anansi story is, at its root, a story about how literature was won. Not by the powerful, not by the physically impressive, not by those who had the backing of institutional authority. By the small, clever, careful, and persistent. The fact that Anansi's stories became the foundational narrative genre of West African oral tradition — and traveled, in the Middle Passage, to the Caribbean and the American South, where Anansi became Aunt Nancy and Brer Rabbit — makes the myth quietly true in addition to beautiful. The spider did obtain all the stories. They are everywhere.