West African Folk-Tales

W. H. Barker's West African Folk-Tales is a collection of old stories for 9 year olds, and many of them star the cleverest, greediest spider you'll ever meet.

What happens

The spider is Anansi, and he starts as he means to go on. In one of the first tales he wants every story in the world to be about him. The chief of the gods agrees, if Anansi can bring him a jar of live bees, a boa constrictor and a tiger. So Anansi tricks all three into it, one a day.

That's the pattern of the book. Somebody has food, or a clever idea, or a magic cooking pot. Anansi wants it. He usually gets it by lying, and quite often it goes horribly wrong for him in the end.

Lots of the tales explain why something is the way it is. Why lizards nod their heads up and down. Why you see ants carrying bundles as big as themselves. Why spiders hide in dusty corners of the ceiling (Anansi is so ashamed at being caught stealing his own family's harvest that he hides up there). Your reader will probably start guessing the "why" before the end of each one!

Anansi doesn't have it all his own way, either. There's a yam that turns into a girl, a grinding stone that makes flour all by itself, and a wise turtle who shows people how to plant palm trees to hold back the sea.

The English is old-fashioned and formal, full of "accordingly" and "thereupon", so it works best read aloud or with a child who's happy with long sentences.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Anansi isn't a cuddly trickster here. In one story he lines a pit with knives and broken bottles, and a rich man falls in and dies. In another he beats a little man to death with sticks, and he pours boiling water into a lizard's mouth so it can't speak. Anansi himself drowns at the end of one tale. Wives are handed out as prizes, and a few words (like "hunchback") are ones we wouldn't use now.

For a sensitive reader that's a lot of cruelty in a row. For a child who loves old stories where the bad guy is really bad and usually gets what's coming to him, it's a treasure chest.

What to read next

If they enjoy a small trickster running rings round everyone bigger, try Lapin Plays Possum. It's a younger, sillier book, but Lapin the rabbit slips off from the cotton picking three times with made-up excuses to scoff Bouki's rum cake, which is exactly what Anansi would do.