Encyclopedia of African American History

Anansi the Spider  133

Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: Th e Origins of

American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1981.

Jordon, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward

the Negro, 1 550– 181 2. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-

lina Press, 1968.

Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in

New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 2004.

Anansi the Spider

Anansi the Spider is a folk hero, originating among the

Ashanti people of West Africa. Enslaved Africans brought

Anansi the Spider stories to the plantations in the Carib-

bean and the Americas and narrated the Anansi tales as a

reminder of their African heritage. A trickster with human

qualities, Anansi tries to outwit his rivals, sometimes win-

ning and other times not. Anansi is usually a likable char-

acter who gets into troubled or funny situations. Some tales

depict Anansi as a bad character. Either way, the Anansi

tales provide the listening audience with an important

moral, or life lesson, at the end of each story.

Anansi’s tales vary by region, including through vari-

ations in the spider’s name (such as Ananse and Nanci) or

through the spider being replaced by a rabbit or another

animal fi gure in a local tale. A popular children’s tale in

North America is Gerald McDermott’s Anansi the Spider:

A Tale from the Ashanti, fi rst published in 1972. A lov-

able spider with whom children can sympathize, Anansi

leaves home for a journey but gets into trouble. Anansi’s

sons quickly mobilize to save their father. Sky God de-

cides the Sun should remain in the Sky and not be given to

Anansi as a reward for one of his sons. Th e telling of this

tale allows children to learn about the Ashanti folk hero,

West African colors and designs, and the Ashanti language

rhythms.

See also: Africanisms; Black Folk Culture; Gold Coast

Margaret Prentice Hecker

Bibliography

Arkhurst, Joyce Cooper. Th e Adventures of Spider: West African

Folktales. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964.

Bowen, Dorothy. “Spiders in African Children’s Stories.” School Li-

brary Media Activities Monthly 20, no. 10 (June 2004):39–40.

print culture extensively, delineating extreme caricatures of
African American physical features and dress to infl uence
white rejection of abolitionism and to heighten anti-black
sentiment in the North and the South.
American fascination with aggressive Anglo- Saxonism
and the racial nationalism that the Revolutionary genera-
tion transmitted to future generations would lead to the
negrophobia and intensive racial theories that emerged
in the 19th century. Th e rise of scientifi c racialism in
Europe in the 1830s spread to the United States by the
1840s and 1850s. American race scientists such as Samuel
George Morton, Josiah Mott, and Louis Agassiz produced
studies that were concerned with proving that apparent
diff erences in people were biological and that African
Americans were actually a diff erent species. Th e quasi-
scientifi c assessments in these publications would play a
large part in the growing belief over the 19th century that
diff erences in color meant black intellectual and physical
inferiority and that these diff erences were fi xed in nature.
Th us, by the Civil War, racial purity became a moral im-
perative because amalgamation would ultimately lead to
the extinction of the white race. Egypt and Carthage were
cited as examples of how mongrelization had ruined past
great civilizations.
David Goodman Croly coined the word “miscegena-
tion” in 1863 to describe the intermarrying of blacks and
whites in a pamphlet he anonymously wrote titled Misce-
genation: Th e Th eory of the Blending of the Races, Applied
to the American White Man and Negro to exacerbate the al-
ready existing racial fears of white Americans and to hope-
fully derail Abraham Lincoln’s second run for presidency.
See also: Acculturation; Miscegenation

Kay Wright Lewis

Bibliography
Berlin, Ira. Many Th ousands Gone: Th e First Two Centuries of Slav-
ery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual
Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1999.
Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. In the Matter of Color: Race and the
American Legal Process, the Colonial Period. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1978.
Horowitz, Helen Lefk owitz. Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual
Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America.
New York: Random, 2002.