The spider who bought every story in the world
In the Ashanti tales of Ghana, every story once belonged to NYAME, the sky god, and ANANSI the spider wanted them. NYAME named his price: a python, a leopard, a swarm of hornets and a fairy nobody ever sees. Bigger, stronger animals had tried and failed. ANANSI tricked each one in turn — he persuaded the python to lie along a palm branch to prove how long it was, then tied it on — and delivered the lot. NYAME kept his word, and in the Akan language stories are still called anansesem, 'spider stories'.
Those stories crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans and survived. ANANSI is still a favourite in Jamaica and across the Caribbean, and in the southern United States he became Aunt Nancy.
A creator with a stomach ache
Africa has fifty-four countries and well over a thousand languages, so there is no single African mythology; the figures in this grid come from peoples thousands of kilometres apart. The Kuba people of the Congo tell of a creator, MBOMBO, also called BUMBA, alone in darkness and water, who felt a terrible pain in his stomach and was sick. Out came the sun, then the moon and stars, then animals including a leopard, a crocodile and a tortoise, and last of all, people.
Asleep on the job
For the Yoruba of West Africa, the sky god OLORUN sent OBATALA down a golden chain to make dry land on the waters below, carrying sand in a snail shell and a hen to scratch it out across the sea. In one well-known version, OBATALA drank too much palm wine on the way and fell asleep, and ODUDUWA finished the job instead, at the place that became the city of Ile-Ife. OBATALA went on to shape the first human bodies, and because some came out imperfect while he was drunk, he became the protector of people born with disabilities.
Red on one side, black on the other
ESHU, the Yoruba messenger between people and the gods, is a trickster too. In a famous story he walks along the path between two farmers who are best friends, wearing a hat that is red on one side and black on the other. Afterwards one friend says the stranger's hat was red, the other swears it was black, and the argument turns into a real quarrel, until ESHU comes back and shows them both sides. It makes a handy lesson for any classroom: two people can look at the same thing and both be partly right.
Honoured on both sides of the ocean
The Yoruba gods, the orishas, also crossed the Atlantic, and they are honoured today in faiths such as Santería in Cuba and Candomblé in Brazil. YEMOJA, mother of the sea, is known in Brazil as Iemanjá. Every 2 February huge crowds in the city of Salvador carry flowers and gifts down to the water for her, and on New Year's Eve many people in Rio de Janeiro dress in white and send flowers out into the waves. In Nigeria, the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, a forest shrine to the river goddess OSHUN, is a World Heritage Site with a festival every August.