Anansesem

Anansesem, literally spider tales, is a West African oral and literary tradition of trickster stories centered on the spider figure Anansi, originating among the Akan people of present-day Ghana. As the scholar Peggy Appiah observed, Anansi is so well known that he gave his name to the whole rich tradition of tales on which generations of Ghanaian children were raised, anansesem. The stories were part of an exclusively oral tradition, and Anansi himself was regarded as synonymous with skill and wisdom in speech; each tale typically closes with a proverb offering moral instruction to its listeners. Carried across the Atlantic by the slave trade, the tradition spread from Ghana to the West Indies, Suriname, Sierra Leone and the Netherlands Antilles and eventually to North America, producing regional variants under names such as Ba Anansi, Nanzi, Nancy and Aunt Nancy for the same trickster figure.