Black Folklore: How West African Stories Traveled and Survived

In one Akan telling recorded in the 1930s, the storyteller opens by taking it all back: We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true. Then the tale begins anyway. Somewhere in the first minute, a child interrupts to argue with the spider.

That opening is a piece of engineering, and it is the first step in a chain that ends in a folding chair in western North Carolina, where a teller is about to give a room some Black folklore out loud. Between the Akan hearth and the Haywood County community room there is a mechanism, and it is worth walking through in order, because every step of it changed the stories, and not one of the steps was an accident.

First, the story happens in a room

Before a folktale is a text, it is an event with a time, a place, and a crowd.

Among the Akan of Ghana, the body of tales is called anansesem (roughly ah-nan-SEH-sem) — spider stories — after the trickster who dominates them. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin, a folktale is an àlọ́, and a whole class of them carries songs the audience is expected to sing back. In many communities across the region, telling is evening work, after the day's labour, and there are conventions about when it is proper to begin.

The room is not an audience in the theatre sense. It answers. It sings the refrain, corrects the teller, laughs at the wrong moment on purpose, and asks why the tortoise did that. Children are allowed to object. Adults are allowed to say that in their mother's version the ending went differently, and that objection is not a disruption of the form; it is the form. A tale told twice by the same person to two different rooms is two different tales, tuned to who is sitting there.

One clarification before going further, because it is the single most common mix-up. The jeli (JEH-lee), known in French-speaking West Africa as the griot, is not the same as the person telling animal stories to a family at night. Among the Mande peoples of Mali, Guinea, Senegal and the Gambia, jeliw belong to hereditary lineages and hold history, genealogy, praise and the great epics — the Sunjata narrative above all. That is a profession with training and obligations. Folktale telling is something a grandmother does. Both are oral tradition; they are not the same job, and collapsing them flattens two distinct institutions into one costume.

Then the story is built to travel

A tale designed to be repeated by anyone is built differently from a tale designed to be read.

Start with the actors. A spider, a tortoise, a hare, a hyena, an elephant. Animal characters carry no biography that has to be explained, no genealogy, no village of origin. You can tell an Anansi story to someone who has never heard of Anansi and it still runs, because the spider's only real attribute is that he is small and he talks his way through. That portability is not incidental. It is the reason these stories survived a crossing that destroyed almost everything else.

Then look at what the plots are actually about. Strip the animals out and most of them are arguments about power: what the weak party can do when the strong party holds every advantage, what happens to greed, why the clever move sometimes costs you your reputation. These are not children's entertainments that happen to have a moral pinned on. They are compact reasoning about how to live in a society where you do not hold the leverage — which is a subject that stays relevant no matter where the story lands.

And then there is the closing. A formula recorded among the Akan ends the telling like this: This is my story, which I have related. If it be sweet, or if it be not sweet, take some elsewhere, and let some come back to me. Read that again as an instruction, because that is what it is. The teller is not signing the work. The teller is handing it over and asking that pieces of it be carried out of the room, spent somewhere else, and returned changed. A tradition that ends every performance by licensing its own redistribution is a tradition engineered to move.

The story in brief: how Anansi bought the sky-god's stories

One tale explains the whole system, and it is the one about how stories came to belong to a spider.

In the widely told Akan version, all the stories in the world belonged to Nyame (NYAH-meh), the sky god. Kwaku Ananse, the spider, went up and asked to buy them. Nyame named a price that was meant to be impossible: Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, the Mmoboro hornets, and Mmoatia, the small forest being nobody can lay hands on. Great chiefs had tried and failed.

Ananse did not fight any of them. He talked. He got the python to stretch himself out alongside a pole to settle an argument about who was longer, and tied him to it. He got the leopard into a pit and out of it on terms that ended with the leopard trussed. He convinced the hornets that rain was coming and offered them shelter in a gourd. He set a trap the forest being could not resist. Then he carried the lot up to the sky and paid.

Nyame handed over the stories, and from then on they were called anansesem — Anansi's stories.

The consequence is the point. The origin story of storytelling in this tradition is about a small creature with no strength acquiring the right to speak, by cunning, and being credited by name forever after. When a people whose stories were about to be carried into bondage packed one narrative above all others, that is the one they packed.

Then the tellers are taken, and the names fall off

The next link in the chain is the transatlantic slave trade, and the specific thing to understand is what could and could not survive it.

People were taken from Senegambia, from the Sierra Leone region, from the Gold Coast, from the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, from West Central Africa. They arrived speaking languages that were not mutually intelligible, deliberately mixed to prevent organisation. Shrines did not cross. Instruments largely did not cross. Lineages, place names, the authority to perform particular ceremonies — these did not cross, and where they were reassembled, they were reassembled from fragments.

The animal tale crossed intact, because the animal tale needed nothing but a teller and a listener.

Some names crossed too, where enough people from one region ended up in one place. In Jamaica the spider is Anancy, still working, still winning by talk. Along the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, in Gullah Geechee communities where West African retention was strongest, the tales were called Nancy stories and the trickster turns up as Aunt Nancy — Anansi, ferried through a language change and a gender change, but with the sound of the name still on him. That single surviving syllable is the hardest physical evidence anyone has for how Black folklore in the Americas is connected to the Akan hearth.

Other stories were made new on this side of the water and carry the crossing itself as their subject. On the Georgia coast, the tradition of the flying Africans — people who rose and went back — is remembered in connection with Igbo Landing on St. Simons Island, where in 1803 a group of captive Igbo people walked into the water rather than continue into slavery. Versions differ on what happened and on what the flight means, and the differences matter to the communities that keep them. What does not vary is that the story is told as the true account of an event, not as an animal fable.

Then the trickster changes job

On the far side of the crossing, the same plot starts doing different work.

A story about a small animal outwitting a large one is entertaining anywhere. Told in a slave quarter, it is also technical. The rabbit is physically outmatched in every scene and wins in every scene, and he wins the same way each time: by controlling what the powerful party believes. He misdirects. He plays weaker than he is. He lets his opponent's appetite do the work.

The best-known example is the one everybody half-remembers. Caught at last, the rabbit begs not to be thrown into the briar patch — anything but the briar patch — and is thrown into the briar patch, which is where he was born and where nothing can follow him. The tactic is to name your advantage as your punishment and let your captor deliver you to it.

Nobody needs that explained in a lecture. A room understood it on the night, and the tale could be told in front of anyone, because on the surface it is just a rabbit.

Where does Brer Rabbit come from?

Brer Rabbit descends from a family of hare tricksters told across West and Central Africa, reshaped in the American South by people who arrived carrying those stories. The clearest single piece of evidence sits in Louisiana. In Creole folktales collected there in the nineteenth century, the rabbit is Compair Lapin and his foil is Compair Bouki — and bouki is the Wolof word for hyena, the hare's standard opponent in Senegambian tales. The hyena kept his Wolof name across an ocean and into French.

Similar hare tricksters appear widely in the region: among the Wolof of Senegal, Leuk the hare outmanoeuvres larger animals through the same repertoire of flattery and misdirection. Where enslaved Akan people were concentrated, the spider survived instead. Where they were not, the spider's role was frequently filled by the hare, and in parts of the Yoruba-speaking world by Ìjàpá (ee-JAH-pah), the tortoise, also written Àjàpá — greedy, brilliant, and regularly punished for it.

Scholars have argued for more than a century about the exact proportions, and honest accounts say so. There are European animal-fable traditions in the mix, and there is documented exchange with Native American storytelling in the Southeast. The tar-baby episode in particular has analogues on several continents. What is not seriously disputed is that the core trickster repertoire of African American folklore came from Africa with the people who were taken, and that the swap of spider for rabbit tracks who was taken from where.

Then someone writes it down, and something freezes

The next step in the chain is print, and it cuts both ways.

In 1880, Joel Chandler Harris published the first Uncle Remus collection. He had heard the tales from Black storytellers in Georgia, and he took the plots down with real care. He also built a frame around them: a genial elderly formerly enslaved man, telling stories to a white child on a plantation, in a heavy phonetic dialect, at leisure. The tales inside that frame are genuine. The frame is a lie about the conditions under which they were told, and it is the version that went into American culture at scale, all the way to a 1946 Disney film the company has spent decades declining to re-release.

So print preserved the stories and libelled the tellers in the same volume.

The correction came from inside the tradition. Zora Neale Hurston, trained as an anthropologist, went back to Eatonville, Florida and out through the sawmill camps and published Mules and Men in 1935. She recorded the tales in the setting where they actually occurred: adults on a porch, competing, showing off, one-upping each other, using the community's own word for the tales — lies. No plantation frame, no child, no fond old retainer. Just people who were extremely good at this doing it in front of someone who knew what she was hearing. Later, Virginia Hamilton's The People Could Fly, published in 1985, put the retellings back in the hands of a Black author writing for Black children, flying Africans and all.

There is a second, quieter cost to writing any of it down. Print fixes one performance, on one night, from one teller, and then that performance starts to look like the story. It is not. It is a version. Anyone who has heard two grandmothers disagree about an ending already knows this.

Last, the story is told again

Which brings the chain to a room with chairs in it, in Waynesville, once a month.

A live telling restores the parts that print cannot hold. The teller watches who is in the room and adjusts. The refrain gets sung back or it does not, and the telling changes depending. A ten-year-old objects and gets answered. The pauses land where the pauses are supposed to land, which on the page is only ever a guess. And at the end, if the teller uses one, the closing formula does its old job of pushing the material back out the door in the listeners' hands.

This is not a small point about atmosphere. In a tradition built around performance, the audience is a working component. A recording of a storyteller is a record of a story. A room is the machine running.

There is also a local reason these stories are not visitors here. Black families have been in these mountains for as long as there have been towns in them, and western North Carolina has its own long-collected storytelling tradition — the Jack tales gathered from mountain families in the twentieth century, in which a poor boy with nothing beats giants and kings by being quicker than they are. That is the same architecture as the rabbit and the briar patch, arrived by a different road. Two traditions that both concluded, separately, that the interesting question is what the small party does. Sitting in a room where one of them is told well is the fastest way to hear the other one differently.

Attending is not a matter of receiving expertise from the front of the room. It is supplying the half of the form that has been missing since the tales went into books.

Names and terms

• Anansesem (ah-nan-SEH-sem) — Akan term for folktales generally; literally, spider stories.
• Kwaku Ananse / Anansi (ah-NAN-see) — the Akan spider trickster who wins by talk rather than strength.
• Nyame (NYAH-meh) — the Akan sky god, who owned all stories before Anansi bought them.
• Àlọ́ (roughly AH-law) — Yoruba term for a folktale; a large class of them carries songs the audience sings back.
• Ìjàpá / Àjàpá (ee-JAH-pah) — the tortoise trickster of Yoruba tales, clever and frequently punished for greed.
• Leuk — the hare trickster of Wolof storytelling in Senegal.
• Bouki — Wolof for hyena; the hare's standard opponent, and the name that resurfaced in Louisiana Creole tales.
• Jeli / griot (JEH-lee) — hereditary Mande specialists in history, genealogy, praise and epic; a distinct profession from folktale telling.
• Gullah Geechee — the communities of the South Carolina and Georgia coast and Sea Islands, where West African retention in language and story is strongest in the United States.

One trickster, several names

A teller in Ghana would close by handing it over: this is the story, and if it was sweet or if it was not, take some of it elsewhere and let some come back.

The myth is that these were simple animal tales that drifted across the Atlantic on their own and were kindly written down for children by a man on a Georgia porch. The accurate version is that people carried them deliberately, swapped the spider for the rabbit to fit new ground, kept the hyena's Wolof name for two hundred years, and are still keeping them alive the only way the form allows — out loud, to a room that answers back.