Anansi the Spider - Why This African Trickster Changed the World

1. 0:03Every story you have ever heard belongs to a spider. Before there were books, before there were writers, before ink ever touched paper, all the stories in the world belonged to one small clever creature. His name is Anansi, and this is how he changed the world.
2. 0:22In the forests of what is now Ghana, the Akan people built a civilization that stretched across West Africa, the Ashanti Empire. With its golden stool and mighty armies, was feared by all.
3. 0:38But the Ashanti knew something that warriors often forget, the most powerful weapon is not a spear, it is a story.
4. 0:48They called him Kwaku Ananse, the spider. He was not big, he was not strong. He could not fight a leopard or wrestle a python. But Ananse he had something more dangerous than muscle. He had a mind that never stopped working, and a tongue that could talk the sun
5. 1:08into setting early.
6. 1:10Above the clouds lived Nyame, the sky god, Anansi's own father. Nyame [music] was the creator of all things. He held the rain, the sun, and the seasons [music] in his hands. But he also held something else, something he [music]
7. 1:28guarded more jealously than any treasure on Earth.
8. 1:33Stories. Every tale [music] ever told, every fable, every legend, every whisper around the fire, all of them were locked inside a golden box in Nyame's palace.
9. 1:46Nobody on the Earth had stories of their own. They all belonged to the sky god, and Anansi decided that was going to [music] change.
10. 1:57The spider climbed up to heaven. He stood before the sky god and said, "Father, I want to buy all the stories."
11. 2:05Nyame laughed. Kings and chiefs had tried before, armies had tried, and here was a spider, barely the size of a man's fist, [music] asking for the greatest treasure in existence.
12. 2:18Nyame set a price no one could pay. "You bring me four things," said the sky god.
13. 2:25"You need the python who swallows men whole, Mmoboro, the hornets whose sting brings death, Osebo, the leopard who fears nothing, >> [music] >> and Mmoatia, the fairy no one can see."
14. 2:40Four impossible tasks for one small spider.
15. 2:48Anansi went to the forest where Onini the python lived. He carried a palm branch and a long vine. He stood where the python could hear him and said loudly, "My wife says [music] you are shorter than this branch. I say she is wrong." The python, proud and vain,
16. 3:06stretched himself out to prove his length.
17. 3:09And while Onini stretched, Anansi [music] tied him to the branch with the vine. One knot, two knots, three. The great [music] python who swallowed men whole was caught by a spider who used nothing but words. This is the way of the trickster. The mind is always
18. 3:30stronger than the body.
19. 3:32Next came the hornets.
20. 3:34Anansi filled a gourd with water and poured it over himself and over the hornets' nest. Then he placed a banana leaf over his head and cried out, "The rains have come. Quick, fly into this dry gourd before your wings are ruined."
21. 3:52And the hornets flew inside.
22. 3:55For Osebo the leopard, Anansi dug a deep pit and covered it with leaves. The leopard fell in at night. In the morning, Anansi offered to help him climb out. He lowered a vine, but when Osebo was halfway up, Anansi let the vine swing, and the leopard dangled
23. 4:16helplessly in the air.
24. 4:18The fairy Mmoatia was the hardest.
25. 4:22Anansi carved a wooden doll and covered it in sticky sap from the tree. He placed a bowl of yam beside it. When Mmoatia came to eat, she thanked the doll. The doll did not answer. The fairy slapped it in anger and a hand stuck fast.
26. 4:41Anansi returned to heaven carrying all four prizes. Nyame looked at the tiny spider who had done what no king or warrior could do. He did not laugh this time. "Anansi," said the sky god, "from this day forward, all stories belong to
27. 4:59you. They shall be called Anansi spider tales."
28. 5:05The golden box opened, and out poured every story that ever was or ever would be. They scattered across the world like seeds on the wind. From that moment, every story told anywhere on Earth, whether the teller knows it or not, is
29. 5:22an Anansesem, a gift from a spider to all of humanity.
30. 5:31In Ghana to this day, >> [music] >> when someone begins to tell a story, they do not say "Once upon a time." They say "We do not really mean it. We do not really mean it." And the audience replies, "We are listening. We are listening." This is how Anansena are
31. 5:47told, spider tales.
32. 5:50Anansi was not always wise. Once he gathered all the wisdom in the world into a pot and tried to hide it at the top of a tree, but the pot on his chest made climbing impossible. His young son called up, "Father, if you put the pot
33. 6:07on your back, you could climb easily."
34. 6:10Anansi was so angry that [music] his own child was wiser than him that he dropped the pot. It shattered on the ground, and wisdom scattered everywhere. That is why no one person holds all the wisdom in the world. It belongs to everyone. Even
35. 6:28the [music] youngest child can teach the oldest elder.
36. 6:33In the Caribbean, Anansi's rival became tiger, [music] the big, strong, fearsome tiger who thought muscle was everything. But in every story, every single [music] one, Anansi wins. Not by fighting, never by fighting. He wins by thinking, by talking, [music]
37. 6:51by making the powerful believe they are being clever when they are being fooled.
38. 6:56Every culture has a trickster. The Yoruba have Eshu, the keeper of the crossroads. The Norse have Loki. Native Americans have coyote. But Anansi is special because he does not just trick for himself, he tricks for the powerless. His stories taught the
39. 7:17enslaved that the small can defeat the mighty.
40. 7:22The trickster is the hero [music] of the oppressed. When you cannot win by force, you win [music] by wit. When the powerful make the rules, you find the loopholes. Every Anansi [music] story is a survival lesson disguised as
41. 7:37entertainment. That is why when Africans were taken across the ocean, the spider came with them.
42. 7:47>> [music] >> Beginning in the 15th century, European ships came to the West African coast.
43. 7:53They did not come for stories, they came for people. Over four centuries, more than 12 million Africans were taken across the Atlantic in chains. Entire civilizations were torn apart, but they could not chain the stories. They could not chain Anansi.
44. 8:12In the belly of slave ships, packed so tightly they could not move, men and women who once had names, families, kingdoms, whispered to each other in the dark. They whispered stories, Anansi stories, stories of the small outsmarting the powerful. Stories that
45. 8:31said, "We will survive this. We will endure."
46. 8:36The stories survived the middle passage.
47. 8:38They crossed the Atlantic in the memories of the enslaved. No ship could carry them. No chain could bind them. No slave master could find them [music] to destroy them. The stories lived in mouths and in hearts, invisible and
48. 8:53indestructible. The spider had spun a web across an ocean.
49. 8:58In Jamaica, [music] Anansi became Anancy. The spider lost none of his cunning.
50. 9:05>> [music] >> Jamaicans made him their own, gave him new stories, new enemies, new tricks. He became a national folk hero, the symbol of a people who used their wits to survive the most brutal system humanity has ever created.
51. 9:21The Anansi stories were more than entertainment. They were coded resistance. When a slave told a story of Anansi tricking the master, everyone understood the real meaning. The trickster was teaching them how to survive, how to navigate a world where
52. 9:38they had no power except the power of their minds.
53. 9:43Today, across the Caribbean, from Jamaica to Suriname to Carriacou, Anansi festivals celebrate the spider who survived. Children grow up with Anansi stories the same way they grew up in Ghana centuries ago. The tradition never
54. 9:59broke. The web stretched, but it never snapped. The spider held on through everything.
55. 10:06But the spider's web did not stop in the Caribbean. It stretched further, northward to the cotton fields and tobacco plantations of the American South. And there something remarkable happened. The spider changed his shape.
56. 10:23He took off his eight legs and put on long ears, and Anansi became something new.
57. 10:32In the American South, enslaved Africans transformed Anansi into Br'er Rabbit.
58. 10:38The rabbit, like the spider, was small and clever. He could not fight bear or fox with strength, so he fought with tricks. Every Br'er Rabbit story is an Anansi story wearing a different mask.
59. 10:52The same lessons, the same hope.
60. 10:55Every night, after the fields, after the punishments, after the degradation, they gathered and told stories. Stories where the weak defeated the strong, where the clever escaped the cruel. These were not just tales, they were maps for survival,
61. 11:14instructions coded in laughter. Anansi would have been proud of his American children.
62. 11:21In 1881, a white journalist named Joel Chandler Harris published Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings. He had listened to enslaved Africans telling stories and wrote them down in exaggerated dialects. [music] He became famous. He became rich. He
63. 11:40never once mentioned Anansi. He never once acknowledged where these stories came from.
64. 11:47Then came Disney. In 1946, [music] they released Song of the South. They turned the stolen stories into a musical. They made millions from tales that enslaved Africans had carried across the >> [music] >> ocean in chains.
65. 12:03African mythology became Disney property, and still no one spoke the name of the spider who started it all.
66. 12:12Disney eventually locked their own film in [music] a vault, embarrassed by its racism. But the deeper crime was never addressed. An entire [music] tradition of African storytelling stretching back thousands of years had been taken,
67. 12:27renamed, resold, and erased. Br'er Rabbit replaced Anansi. [music] America forgot that its most famous folk stories were African. [music] In 2005, Neil Gaiman published Anansi Boys. For many readers, it was the first time they heard the name Anansi, [music]
68. 12:49the first time they learned that Br'er Rabbit was an African spider [music] in disguise.
69. 12:55The real name was finally being spoken again. The thread reconnected.
70. 13:00>> [music] >> The web began to repair itself.
71. 13:07In Jamaica today, [music] Anansi stories are taught in every school. The spider is a national treasure, protected [music] and celebrated. Jamaican children know what American children do not, that their favorite trickster was born in Africa,
72. 13:22that he crossed the ocean, [music] that he refused to die, no matter what the world did to him.
73. 13:28And in Ghana, where it all began, the tradition never stopped. Anansi spider tales are still told the same way they were told a thousand years [music] ago.
74. 13:38The elder begins, the audience responds.
75. 13:41The stories change with [music] the times, but the spider remains. He was there at the beginning, he will be there at the end.
76. 13:49Anansi has appeared in Marvel Comics, in video games, in television shows, in theatrical [music] productions across the world. Every new version is another thread in the web. The spider who once tricked a python and a leopard now
77. 14:05tricks his way into the imaginations of millions who may never have heard of Ghana.
78. 14:11From a village in Ghana to the courts of a sky god, from the holds of slave ships to the fires of the Caribbean, from the cotton fields of the American South to the bookshelves of the world, one golden thread connects them all. One tiny
79. 14:29spider spun a web that covers the entire earth.
80. 14:34Anansi did not just survive the middle passage, he conquered the world. Not with armies, not with gold, with stories. And every time you tell a tale around a fire, every time you read to a child at night, you are spinning another
81. 14:51thread in the spider's web. Kwaku Anansi would be proud.

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