Anansi

Anansi went to the sky god Nyame and asked to buy his stories, the ones that held all the world's wisdom. Nyame told him that whole towns, full of men and wealth, had already tried and failed to meet the price he asked. In Belcher's telling that price was four things: the python, the leopard, a bush-spirit and the hornets, and Anansi agreed at once, promising to throw in his own mother besides. He went home and made his plan with his wife, Aso, named here in Leeming's Oxford Companion to World Mythology.

For the hornets, Kallen's African Mythology has Anansi fill a gourd with water and go into the forest until he found their nest, then splash water on the nest and over himself and hold a leaf above his head as if sheltering from a sudden rain. Once the hornets believed their nest was about to flood, he had only to offer them the dry gourd instead, then plug the hole behind them and carry it, sealed, to Nyame. For the python, he cut a length of bamboo and told the snake he had a wager with his wife over which of the two was longer, and once the python stretched himself out to be measured, Anansi wound vines up its coiled body and bound it fast to the pole. Belcher's telling catches the leopard in a covered pit, two sticks planted inside to force its paws apart as it tried to climb out, and Anansi struck it back down with a knife before hauling it up on a ladder; Lynch's and Kallen's own tellings instead spring a bent tree on a rope tied to the leopard's tail, so that releasing the tree leaves it dangling in the air. Last of all, Anansi carved a wooden doll and coated it with sticky gum; the bush-spirit struck out at it in anger and stuck fast, hand and foot and belly in turn, until Anansi stepped out from behind his tree to claim his final prize.

When each of the four had been caught, Anansi carried them to Nyame along with the mother he had promised to add to the price. Lynch's African Mythology A to Z closes the bargain plainly: the sky god agreed the price was paid, and from that day on, every story in the world belonged to Anansi.

Anansi boasted once too often that he was cleverer than the sky god Wulbari, and Wulbari heard him say it. Furious, Wulbari gave him a task without naming it: bring me something, he said, and would say no more. Anansi spent a whole day thinking and gained nothing for it but Wulbari's laughter, so the next morning, Belcher's African Myths of Origin says, he went down to earth, took a feather from every bird he could find, and wove them into a disguise.

In a version of this same Krachi tale, Wulbari came out and noticed a strange, many-coloured bird perched nearby and asked the animals gathered there what it was. None of them knew, though one suggested Anansi might, not realising that Anansi himself was the bird above their heads. Wulbari admitted he could not ask his own messenger, since it was the messenger he had sent away to find the answer, and when the animals pressed him to say what that answer was, he named it without knowing who was listening: the sun, the moon and darkness.

Once the animals had scattered, Anansi came down from his perch, shed the feathers, and went out into the world to find what Wulbari had named without meaning to. He was gone a long time. Some say a python had swallowed the sun, the moon and darkness whole, though other tellings give other explanations; however he found them, Anansi put all three into his bag and carried them back to Wulbari's court, arriving late one afternoon to prove, as Coleman's Dictionary of Mythology has it, that he was as clever as the sky god himself.

Anansi had once given away his own wisdom to anyone who came asking, until he decided the world was not grateful enough for it and set out to take it all back. He gathered every scrap into a single gourd and tied it across his chest, meaning to carry it up a tall tree where no one else could reach it. The load was too heavy and awkward tied that way, and after several failed attempts to climb, his own young son, Ntikuma, told him to try tying the gourd to his back instead.

In Kallen's African Mythology, the advice was sound, but hearing it angered Anansi: if he truly owned every scrap of wisdom in the world, his own small son should not have seen what he had missed. He took the advice anyway, tied the gourd to his back, and this time climbed the tree with ease. At the top, disturbed at being outdone by his own child, he hurled the gourd down onto a rock in fury, and it smashed. People ran to the spot from every direction; the quickest to arrive scooped up a good share of the scattered wisdom, while the ones who came late were left with only scraps, which is given here as the reason some people are wiser than others.

Lynch's African Mythology A to Z keeps the son's advice and the angry climb, but changes the vessel and the accident: here it is a pot, not a gourd, and it is not thrown down on purpose but slips from Anansi's own hands as his temper makes him clumsy while he tries to tie it into the tree, smashing on a rock below all the same. Lynch also records a third telling in which Anansi ignores his son's advice altogether and simply falls from the tree himself, scattering the wisdom that way instead.