Tales from the African Diaspora, Anansi the Spider and Br’er Rabbit
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Anansi is one of the most important legendary characters of West African and Caribbean folklore. In the legends, he often takes the shape of a spider. Anansi is considered to be the spirit of all knowledge of stories, and he is also known as Ananse, Kwaku Ananse, and Anancy; and in the southern United States he has evolved into Aunt Nancy.
Anansi is sometimes depicted in many different ways. He can looks like an ordinary spider, sometimes he is a spider wearing clothes, or with a spider with a human face. Sometimes Anansi looks much more like a human with spider elements, such as eight legs.
The Anansi tales originated with the Ashanti of present-day Ghana. The word Ananse is from the Akan language and means "spider". The tales of Anansi later spread to other Akan groups and then to the Caribbean, Suriname (in South America), and Sierra Leone (where they were introduced by Jamaican Maroons when they repatriated to West Africa) . On Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire, he is known as Kompa Nanzi, and his wife as Shi Maria.
Br'er Rabbit (Brother Rabbit), also spelled Bre'r Rabbit or Brer Rabbit or Bruh Rabbit, is a central figure in stories of African-Americans from the Black Belt of the American Southern . Br'er Rabbit is a trickster who succeeds by his wits rather than by brawn, provoking authority figures and bending social mores as he sees fit. Walt Disney later adapted this character for its deeply racial stereo typed but groundbreaking 1946 animated movie Song of the South.
As a child I grew up listening to stories of Anansi from my mom and aunt (as some of you may know my family is from Jamaica). I heard them first as oral stories, and later I was given children’s book filled with his tales. Sometime later while I was in grade school, one of my older sisters was doing a book report on Br’er rabbit and she asked my mom to look at how similar the stories were. This lead to a fascinating summer, where my mom took us to the public library and we researched Br’er rabbit (took the book home with us) and compared them to the Anansi story books we had at home.
Anansi the Spider
Anansi stories are some of the best-known tales amongst the Asante people of Ghana. The stories made up an exclusively oral tradition, and indeed Anansi himself was synonymous with skill and wisdom in speech. It was as remembered oral traditions that they crossed over to the Caribbean and other parts of the New World with captives slaves via the Atlantic slave trade.
In the Caribbean, Anansi is celebrated as a symbol of slave resistance and survival. Anansi is able to turn the table on his powerful oppressors by using his cunning and trickery, a model of behavior utilized 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 the slaves' lives; as well as inspiring strategies of resistance, the tales enabled enslaved Africans 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, enslaved Africans in the New World devoted “the structure and message of their tales to the compulsions and needs of their present situation” (1977, 90). Especially before and after Caribbean islands began to gain their independence, Anansi both as a symbol of anti-slavery resistance and as a connection to the pre-slavery African culture, of Caribbean’s black slave, sparked a scholarly revival in study of Anansi. There was also a lot of field work done between the newly independent Caribbean nations and West Africa.
In West African stories, Anansi became such a prominent part of Ashanti oral culture that the word Anansesem—"spider tales"—came to embrace all kinds of fables. One of the few studies that examine 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. 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." Elsewhere they have other names, for instance Ananse-Tori in Suriname, Anansi in Guyana, and Kuent'i Nanzi in Curacao.
For people living in the African diaspora, the Jamaican versions of these stories are the most well preserved. Jamaica had the largest concentration of enslaved Asante in the Americas. Jamaica’s slaves were estimated to be from 60-80% Asante (with the remained mostly made up of Ibo from present day Nigeria). This concentration of ethnic Asantes helped to give them a greater ability to be preserved.
On unique feature of all Anansi stories in Jamaica, was that they had a proverb (in Jamaican patois) added to their end. For example st the end of the story "Anansi and Brah Dead", there is a proverb; "If yuh cyaan ketch Kwaku, yuh ketch him shut", which refers to when Brah Dead (brother death or drybones), a personification of Death, was chasing Anansi attempting 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.
What I found interesting in these proverbs, is that it suggests that even in times of slavery, Anansi was referred to by his Akan original name: Kwaku Anansi as Kwaku is used interchangeably with Anansi. Many terms in Jamaimac patois come directly from Ghana (such as the word “nam” which means to eat). Finding these clues to the original languages of slaves is always interesting. There is also an Anansi story that explains the phenomenon of how his name became attached to the whole corpus of tales:
Once there were no stories in the world. The Sky-God, Nyame, had them all. Anansi went to Nyame and asked how much they would cost to buy.
Nyame set a high price: Anansi must bring back Onini the Python, Osebo the Leopard, and the Mboro Hornets.
Anansi set about capturing these. First he went to where Python lived and debated out loud whether Python was really longer than the palm branch or not as his wife Aso says. Python overheard and, when Anansi explained the debate, agreed to lie along the palm branch. Because he cannot easily make himself completely straight a true impression of his actual length is difficult to obtain, so Python agreed to be tied to the branch. When he was completely tied, Anansi took him to Nyame.
To catch the leopard, Anansi dug a deep hole in the ground. When the leopard fell in the hole Anansi offered to help him out with his webs. Once the leopard was out of the hole he was bound in Anansi's webs and was carried away.
To catch the hornets, Anansi filled a calabash with water and poured some over a banana leaf he held over his head and some over the nest, calling out that it was raining. He suggested the hornets get into the empty calabash, and when they obliged, he quickly sealed the opening.
Anansi handed his captives over to Nyame. Nyame rewarded him by making him the god of all stories.
The recent announcement that a character based off of Anansi will appear in Starz channels new show American Gods, based off the series of books by Neil Gaimen also called American Gods, made me reminisce about the character from my youth.
Br'er Rabbit
The Br'er Rabbit stories can be traced back to trickster whom originated from the folklore of the Bantu-speaking peoples of south and central Africa, particularly the hare Leuk . These tales continue to be part of the traditional folklore of numerous peoples throughout those regions.
Some scholars have suggested that in his American incarnation, Br'er Rabbit represented the enslaved Africans who used their wits to overcome adversity and to exact revenge on their adversaries, the white slave owners. Though not always successful, the efforts of Br'er Rabbit made him a folk hero.
However in African traditions, the trickster is a complex character. While the trickster can be a hero, his amoral nature and his lack of any positive restraint can make him into a villain as well.
For both Africans and African Americans, the animal trickster represents an extreme form of behavior that people may be forced to adopt in extreme circumstances in order to survive. The trickster is not to be admired in every situation. He is an example of what to do, but also an example of what not to do. The trickster's behavior can be summed up in the common African proverb:
"It's trouble that makes the monkey chew on hot peppers."
It generally translates as sometimes people must use extreme measures in extreme circumstances. Several elements in the Brer Rabbit Tar Baby story (e.g., rabbit needing to be taught a lesson, punches and head butting the rabbit does, the stuck rabbit being swung around and around) are reminiscent of those found in a Zimbabwe-Botswana folktale.
Folklorists in the late 19th century first documented evidence that the American versions of the stories originated among enslaved West Africans based on connections between Br'er Rabbit and Leuk, a rabbit trickster in Senegalese folklore.
The stories of Br'er Rabbit were famously written down by Robert Roosevelt, an uncle of US President Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography about his aunt from Georgia, that "She knew all the 'Br'er Rabbit' stories, and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in Harper's, where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who, in 'Uncle Remus', made the stories immortal."
These stories were popularized for the mainstream audience in the late 19th century by Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908), who wrote down and published many such stories that had been passed down by oral tradition. Harris also attributed the birth name Riley to Br'er Rabbit. Harris heard these tales in Georgia. Very similar versions of the same stories were recorded independently at the same time by the folklorist Alcée Fortier in southern Louisiana, where the Rabbit character was known as Compair Lapin in French Creole. Enid Blyton, the English writer of children's fiction, retold the stories for children.
Relationship between Anansi and Br'er Rabbit
Anansi shares similarities with the trickster figure of Br'er Rabbit, who originated from the folklore of the Bantu-speaking peoples of south and central Africa. In the Akan traditions of West Africa, the trickster is usually the spider Anansi, though the plots in his tales are often identical with those of stories of Br'er Rabbit. Anansi however does encounter a tricky rabbit called "Adanko" (Asante-Twi to mean "Hare") in some stories. The Jamaican character with the same name "Brer Rabbit", is an adaptation of the Ananse stories of the Akan people.
Enslaved Africans brought the Br'er Rabbit tales to the New World, which, like the Anansi stories, depict a physically small and vulnerable creature using his cunning intelligence to prevail over larger animals. However, although Br'er Rabbit stories are told in the Caribbean, especially in the French-speaking islands (where he is named “Compair Lapin”), he is predominantly an African-American folk hero. The rabbit as a trickster is also in Akan versions as well and a Bantu origin doesn't have to be the main source, at least for the Caribbean where the Akan people are more dominant than in the U.S. His tales entered the mainstream through the work of the white American journalist Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote several collections of Uncle Remus stories between 1870 and 1906.
One of the times Anansi himself got tricked was when he tried to fight a tar baby after trying to steal food. But Anansi got stuck to it instead. It is a tale well known from a version involving Br'er Rabbit, found in the Uncle Remus stories and adapted and used in the 1946 live-action/animated Disney movie Song of the South. These were derived from Southern African-American folktales, that had part of their origin in African folktales preserved in oral storytelling by African Americans. Elements of the African Anansi tale were combined by African-American storytellers with elements from Native American tales, such as the Cherokee story of the "Tar Wolf", which had a similar theme, but often had a trickster rabbit protagonist.
The Native American trickster rabbit appears to have resonated with African-American story-tellers and was adopted as part of the Anansi character with which they were familiar. Thus, the tale of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby represents a coming together of two separate folk traditions, Native American and African, which coincidentally shared a common theme.
Today in modern America, the stories of Br'er Rabbit exist alongside other stories of Aunt Nancy, and of Anansi himself, coming from both the age of slavery but also from the Caribbean and directly from Africa as immigration from these areas increased after 1965.
Stories of Anansi and Bre'r Rabbit both represent direct connections to the stories and legends that African slaves carried with them to North America. Even as Western slave plantation culture attempted wipe out all memory and connection of enslaved African people to their original country of origin, the spirit of resistance of slaves allowed these stories to endure. These are stories from the “old country”; preserving, understanding, and knowing their origins is an important part of preserving our common culture. Like all stories immigrants to America (both voluntary and forced threw slavery) they are now part of the great melting pot of America culture, and the proverbs and wisdom they carry with, adds to what makes us all Americans.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Lacking a replacement strategy by Congress, an estimated 18 million people who obtained coverage since 2013 via new state and federally administered exchanges are likely to have their coverage thrown into limbo.
Certainly whites made up the biggest group of newly insured Americans under the ACA, with 9 million new people gaining coverage. But poorer minorities also benefited dramatically from provisions in the ACA, including an expansion of Medicaid that provided health care subsidies for many low-income people.
Three million African Americans and 4 million Hispanics--the minority group most likely to lack health insurance--accessed coverage through the ACA. As a result, these groups saw uninsured rates drop 11.8 percentage points and 11.3 percentage points, respectively. That’s according to a 2016 report from the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, the principal advisor to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Other minorities, such as LGBT people, benefited in different ways. The health care act forbid health care providers who take funding from the HHS from discriminating on the basis of sexual or gender orientation. It allowed same-sex families to apply for joint coverage. It also removed lifetime caps on care for chronic conditions, such as HIV, where the annual cost of treatment can be very high.
These groups will continue to be vulnerable without the ACA or something like it, particularly because of its anti-discrimination provisions.
As it is, there are major disparities in the mortality and morbidity rates of black and white Americans. A report published in October by the centrist Brookings Institution highlights some of the statistics: black infants die at twice the rate of their white counterparts—a gap that increases, rather than decreases, as black families become more affluent and educated; black men have the shortest life expectancy of any group; and college-educated whites outlive both black men and women with a high school education or less by a decade or more.
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At the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., a hallway of glass display cases features more than a century’s worth of black entrepreneurial triumphs. In one is a World War II–era mini parachute manufactured by the black-owned Pacific Parachute Company, home to one of the nation’s first racially integrated production plants. Another displays a giant clock from the R. H. Boyd Publishing Company, among the earliest firms to print materials for black churches and schools. Although small, the exhibit recalls a now largely forgotten legacy: By serving their communities when others wouldn’t, black-owned independent businesses provided avenues of upward mobility for generations of black Americans and supplied critical leadership and financial support for the civil rights movement.
This tradition continues today. Last June, Black Enterprise magazine marked the 44th anniversary of the BE 100s, the magazine’s annual ranking of the nation’s top 100 black-owned businesses. At the top of the list stood World Wide Technology, which, since its founding in 1990, has grown into a global firm with more than $7 billion in revenue and 3,000 employees. Then came companies like Radio One, whose 55 radio stations fan out among 16 national markets. The combined revenues of the companies that made the BE 100s, which also includes Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions, now totals more than $24 billion, a nine-fold increase since 1973, adjusting for inflation.
A closer look at the numbers, however, reveals that these pioneering companies are the exception to a far more alarming trend. The last 30 years also have brought the wholesale collapse of black-owned independent businesses and financial institutions that once anchored black communities across the country. In 1985, 60 black-owned banks were providing financial services to their communities; today, just 23 remain. In 11 states where black-owned banks had headquarters in 1994, not a single one is still in business. Of the 50 black-owned insurance companies that operated during the 1980s, today just two remain.
Over the same period, tens of thousands of black-owned retail establishments and local service companies also have disappeared, having gone out of business or been acquired by larger companies. Reflecting these developments, working-age black Americans have become far less likely to be their own boss than in the 1990s. The per-capita number of black employers, for example, declined by some 12 percent just between 1997 and 2014.
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The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bank of America v. Miami strengthened the Fair Housing Act—for now. SLATE: will Fair Housing Stay Fair?
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On Monday, the conservative effort to hobble the Fair Housing Act failed once again at the Supreme Court. By a 5-3 vote, the justices ruled that, under the FHA, cities can sue banks whose predatory lending practices increase segregation. This time around, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberals in embracing a broad theory of standing that lets municipalities go after discriminatory banks. His unexpected vote allowed the court to strengthen the FHA and affirmed progressive cities’ role in combatting housing segregation in the United States.
Bank of America v. Miami, Monday’s decision, arose out of a straightforward lawsuit that Miami filed against Wells Fargo and Bank of America. According to the city, these banks targeted minorities for extremely risky mortgages that came with high interest rates and exorbitant fees. Miami alleges that the banks knew many of these borrowers had bad credit and little cash, yet offered them loans anyway. When the borrowers asked to refinance or modify their original loans, the banks refused, inducing foreclosure. In court filings, Miami provided data indicating that banks were significantly more likely to offer these predatory loans to minorities than to white people.
The city sued under the FHA, alleging that the banks had engaged in racially discriminatory lending practices. Nobody doubts that, if Miami’s allegations are true, the banks violated the FHA. But Wells Fargo and Bank of America argued that the city lacks standing to bring such a suit. The FHA permits only an “aggrieved person” to sue violators of the statute, defining the term as “any person who ... claims to have been injured by a discriminatory housing practice.” Miami, the banks argued, cannot qualify as an “aggrieved person,” because the FHA “is primarily about obtaining redress for individual injury, not vindicating public rights.”
Writing for the majority, Justice Stephen Breyer flatly rejected that argument. Breyer noted that Miami was injured: The banks’ alleged discrimination caused widespread foreclosures and vacancies in the city’s minority communities, decreasing the value of both the foreclosed homes and the affected neighborhoods. In turn, this decline in property values decreased property-tax revenues, hurting the city’s bottom line. In addition, the foreclosures forced the city to spend more on municipal services to remedy blight and unsafe conditions.
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Facing mountainous debt and population loss, the board overseeing Puerto Rico filed Wednesday for the equivalent of bankruptcy protection in a historic move that's sure to trigger a fierce legal battle with the fate of the island's citizens, creditors and workers at stake.
The oversight board appointed to lead the U.S. territory back to fiscal sustainability declared in a court filing that it is "unable to provide its citizens effective services," crushed by $74 billion in debts and $49 billion in pension liabilities.
The filing casts a shadow of uncertainty over the future of Puerto Rico pensioners, American retirees who own the island's debt, institutional investors who backed the island in good times and businesses with lucrative contracts.
But it could also provide hope to residents seeking to preserve access to basic services such as public safety and health care, while also offering a potential route to economic stability for an island that has been suffering for years. Puerto Rico officials have complained that their debt crisis has cut off funds needed to pay doctors and run schools.
Puerto Rico has lost 20% of its jobs since 2007 and 10% of its population, sparking an economic crisis that worsens by the day.
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In 1950, Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield had annexed the white suburb of Buckhead in order to preserve a two-to-one white voting majority in the city and to expand the city’s tax base—all part of Atlanta’s “Plan of Improvement.” It worked: Atlanta became a thriving and diverse Southern metropolis. By 1961, Hartsfield was bragging about the city’s combination of racial progressivism and booming business, dubbing Atlanta the “City Too Busy to Hate.” There was, to be sure, a great deal of hyperbole and cynicism in this declaration, but there was also a sliver of truth: Hartsfield had indeed established a political coalition of racially moderate Democrats, white business leaders, and black voters that outpaced much of the South in its relative racial harmony.
This coalition, however, also birthed a vehement opposition movement of working- and middle-class whites who wanted no part of Atlanta’s expansion. So, in 1965, when Hartsfield, by then out of office, attempted to replicate the success of the Buckhead annexation, things did not go as smoothly. Hartsfield wanted Atlanta to annex Sandy Springs, a majority-white, wealthy neighborhood just outside the city limits in Fulton County. He was met with outrage and obstruction. Two spokesmen for Sandy Springs promised to “build up a city separate from Atlanta and your Negroes and forbid any Negroes to buy, or own, or live within our limits.” Atlanta’s annexation plans had “forced this on us,” they wrote, “and we will fight to the finish.”
Facing a Sandy Springs community fervently opposed to joining Atlanta, the city backed off. (In Georgia, the decision to annex comes down to the wishes of the annex-ees, not the annex-ers.)
In his 2005 book White Flight, the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse tells the story of this white counter-coalition and the effects of their resistance on conservative politics not just in metro Atlanta, but nationwide. White flight, Kruse writes, “was a political revolution,” one that saw white Southern conservatives “abandon their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery and instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism.” Resistance to the integration of public schools, for instance, transformed during this era from an objection to multiracial classrooms to a crusade against “forced busing”; segregated neighborhoods were similarly defended in the name of preserving Americans’ “freedom of association.”
Throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, metro Atlanta’s whites employed this new, ostensibly colorblind language to resist integration and preserve their race-based advantages. In some cases, though, it was easy to read between the lines: In 1975, for example, one Cobb County leader quipped that suburban whites in his area thought of the Chattahoochee River as a “moat” that protected them from Atlanta. “They wish they could build forts across there to keep people from coming up here,” he said.
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Wealth and fame did not shield Jermaine "J. Cole" Cole from the judgment of neighbors and police, who sent a SWAT team to his North Carolina studio under suspicion that he and fellow artists were growing and selling marijuana. The rapper used his surveillance video of the raid as his music video for "Neighbors," which he released yesterday (May 1).
Portions of the video, which you can see above, originally appeared in "J. Cole: 4 Your Eyez Only" documentary, which is available in full on YouTube. Named after his latest album, the special mixes short music videos with clips of Cole's conversations with Black residents of Southern and Midwestern cities like Fayetteville and Ferguson about police brutality and community empowerment.
Keeping with that documentary's themes, the "Neighbors" clip opens on predominantly White police officers in helmets and body armor forcibly entering his studio, "The Sheltuh." The video then shows the officers kicking out his back window, talking to a neighbor and eventually taking down the cameras filming their raid.
Apparently what happened was, we were all in Austin, Texas, for SXSW; thankfully no one was in the house when this went down. One of the neighbors told the police we were growing weed or selling drugs out of this house. And there was a huge investigation, like a million-dollar investigation. They flew helicopters over, sent an entire SWAT team armed with weapons, broke down the door and searched the whole house. Thankfully nobody was in the house. Our engineer Juro "Mez" Davis had just stepped out for lunch and he came back and saw the SWAT team busting down the door.
They go downstairs and all they see is a studio, and obviously they felt stupid. It's just crazy ironic because out of anybody, they picked the wrong person. J. Cole is the last person to do anything like that. He’s out here doing extremely positive things for the community and for young artists. Because of obvious racism from the neighbors, the police were called and a raid took place.
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