My Africana Blog

 Today’s blog pertains to the folklore of Ghana. The emphasis will be on the role played by  the famous Kwaku Ananse- the spider as a protagonist in Ghanaian folktales. Ananse has featured in these Ananse tales for centuries in Ghana, especially in rural villages. As a protagonist, Ananse is almost always a villain, he is always playing tricks on innocent victims, most often, on members of his family-his wife Yaa, his first born Ntikuma, his big-belly, small-legged, and big-headed sons. He is uncharacteristically ruthless, selfish and insensitive, and  sees people as fools.  When we were pupils at the Roman Catholic Mission School at Akaa,  a village in the Buem Traditional area, we used to devote some time every week telling Ananse stories. Sometimes, the teachers would invite an elderly person to the school to tell us new stories. It was a sort of a cultural education we received With great fanfare.  The Ananse stories were not  mere edutainment: the...

 My name is Kwaku Amoabeng. I am a retired professional librarian and college teacher, and  an academically-credentialed Africanist scholar with considerable college teaching and research experience. I taught courses in African-American literature and history, library skills, English composition,  Business English, Third World Literature at the University Of Cape Coast,  Stony Brook University, Passaic County Community College, Paterson. New Jersey, and at Rockland Community College in Suffern, upstate New York. I am a graduate of the University of Ghana, Legon, the University of Cape Coast and Stony Brook University, where I earned a Ph.D in 1986. I have published extensively in modern and traditional African literature in collaboration with Professor Carrol Lasker, including literary essays in the following journals: Africans Journal, World Literature Today, Queens Quarterly: A Canadian University Review. I also served as the director of the Paterson Free Public Li...