Learning Log 5 for Fox Lover: Anansi and West Africa

Monday, April 27, 2015

We Played:

• Telepathy (Deductive Logic, Strategic Thinking)
• 10 Days in Africa  (Geography, Strategic Thinking) We played 3 times.
• Ultimate Mastermind (Deductive Logic, Strategic Thinking)

We Read: Since we read about Africa in Story of the World, including an Anansi story, We read some books on West Africa. (Geography, History, Mythology)

• Ogbo: Sharing Life in an African Village by  Ifeoma Onyefulu -- I found it fascinating how each villager, ages 10 and up, contributes to the village and knows his her or place in the community. I often think this sense of knowing ones role in the family and community -- and making tangible contributions -- is lacking in our culture. That's one reason so many kids and teens are adrift.
• Anansi and the Talking Melon by Eric Kimmel, illustrated by Janet Stevens -- We both enjoyed this trickster tale.
• Anansi's Party Time by Eric Kimmel, illustrated by Janet Stevens -- This was a bit too juvenile for an 11-year-old, but it was still fun.

We talked a bit about how Anansi tales spread throughout the "New World," especially the Caribbean, due to the slave trade and cultural variations on Anasi stories (including modern picture book versions created by contemporary authors.

From Wikipedia:

Anansi tales are some of the best-known amongst the Asante people of Ghana.[1] The stories made up an exclusively oral tradition, and indeed Anansi himself was synonymous with skill and wisdom in speech.[2] It was as remembered and told tales that they crossed to the Caribbean and other parts of the New World with captives via the Atlantic slave trade.[3] In the Caribbean Anansi is often celebrated as a symbol of slave resistance and survival. Anansi is able to turn the table on his powerful oppressors using his cunning and trickery, a model of behaviour utilised by slaves to gain the upper-hand within the confines of the plantation power structure. Anansi is also believed to have played a multi-functional role in slaves’ lives, as well as inspiring strategies of resistance the tales enabled slaves to establish a sense of continuity with their African past and offered them the means to transform and assert their identity within the boundaries of captivity. As historian Lawrence W. Levine argues in Black Culture and Consciousness, slaves in the New World devoted “the structure and message of their tales to the compulsions and needs of their present situation” (1977, 90).[4] 

Stories of Anansi became such a prominent and familiar part of Ashanti oral culture that the word Anansesem—"spider tales"—came to embrace all kinds of fables. One of the few studies that examines the role of Anansi folktales among the Ashanti of Ghana is R.S. Rattray’s Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (1930). The tales in Rattray’s collection were recorded directly from Ashanti oral storytelling sessions and published in both English and Twi.[4]Peggy Appiah, who collected Anansi tales in Ghana and published many books of his stories, wrote: "So well known is he that he has given his name to the whole rich tradition of tales on which so many Ghanaian children are brought up – anansesem – or spider tales."[5] Elsewhere they have other names, for instance Ananse-Tori in Suriname, Nansi in Guyana, and Kuent'i Nanzi in Curaçao. 

For Africans in the diaspora, the Jamaican versions of these stories are the most well preserved, because Jamaica had the largest concentration of Asante as slaves in the Americas. All Anansi stories in Jamaica have a proverb at the end.[6] At the end of the story Anansi and Brah Dead, there is a proverb that suggests even in times of slavery, Anansi was referred to as his Akan original name: Kwaku Anansi or simply as Kwaku interchangeably with Anansi. The proverb is: If yuh cyaan ketch Kwaku, yuh ketch him shut.,[7] which refers to when Brah Dead (brother death or drybones), a personification of Death, was chasing Anansi to kill him. Meaning: The target of revenge and destruction even killing will be anyone very close to the intended such as loved ones and family members. 

Bru Nansi (Virgin Islands)
Annancy or Anancy (Jamaica, Grenada, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nicaragua)
Anansi (Trinidad and Tobago)
Anansi Drew (The Bahamas)
Aunt Nancy (South Carolina)
Cha Nanzi (Aruba)
Kompa Nanzi (Curaçao, Bonaire)
Kwaku Anansi (Akanland)
Ba Anansi (Suriname)