Perhaps the most prominent figure in West African folklore, Anansi is the God of stories, having received them from the Sky God Nyame as a reward for cleverly completing tasks that the latter had set for him. A great trickster, Anansi appears alternately as a spider and a man, and many tales involve him trying to trick people for his own benefit, only to have his devious machinations backfire. Having begun as an oral tradition amongst the Ashanti people in Ghana, Anansi stories quickly spread to other Akan groups, and eventually across the Atlantic to New World via the slave trade, where he was adopted as a symbol of resistance and survival. Read Less