The Exception Who Proves the Rules: Ananse the Akan Trickster

Abstract

Recent studies of the Trickster in world folklore1 have indicated his role as threat to the rules of societal and cosmic order. He is a paradoxical figure whose antics mock the seriousness of rules, the sacrality of beliefs, and the establishment of rituals. He is a vagabond, an intruder to proper society, an unpredictable liar who throws doubt on the concept of truth itself. As a folklore figure he is both human and divine, a person and an animal, creative and destructive, a success and failure. His tales are sometimes myths, sometimes legends, sometimes connected with ritual, sometimes not. They can be entertainment, education, a form of humorous rebellion. They can evaluate, explain, and reflect upon realities, thereby making those realities clearer and more profound to the people who tell and hear the tales. By breaking the patterns of a culture the Trickster helps define those patterns. By acting irresponsibly he helps define responsibility. He threatens, yet he teaches, too. He throws doubt on realities but helps concentrate attention on realities. He crosses supposedly unbreakable boundaries between culture and nature, life and death, and thereby draws attention to those boundaries. Societies only tolerate Trickster tales, but create and re-create2 them because they serve the vital purpose of questioning and affirming, casting doubt and building faith upon the most important societal concepts. It is my purpose in this paper to examine the Trickster tales of the Twi-speaking peoples of West Africa, the Ashanti and other Akan. My interest is not in the stories as folklore, the relationships of their motifs to world folklore;3 rather, my aim is to discover the meanings of the Akan Trickster tales to the Akan. I wish to see them in their cultural context. I know that one can find similar episodes of similar Tricksters in the other areas of the world. Elsewhere the

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