The Tshi, Ewe and Yoruba languages are genderless, like the Bantu. (The word ba has come to mean "a daughter" when appropriated as a suffix to feminine names; but, properly, it seems to mean "a child" of either sex.) This fact explains the appearance of such personages as "Brother Cow" (see also Mr. Jekyll's note on [p. 107]), and the wild confusion of pronouns sometimes observed: "Annancy really want that gal fe marry, but he couldn' catch him."—"When the gal go, him go meet Brother Death,"—etc.
The few words given as "African" by Mr. Jekyll seem to be traceable to Tshi. "Massoo" (pp. [12], [13]) is mã so = to lift. Afu ("hafoo," "afoo," [p. 18]) is not in Christaller's Dictionary, except as equivalent to "grass," or "herbs"; fufu is a food made from yams or plantains boiled and pounded; perhaps there is some slight confusion. Nyam is not "to eat," but enãm is Tshi for "meat," as nyama (in some form or other) is in every Bantu language. The nonsense-words in the songs may be corrupted from Tshi or some cognate language, but a fuller knowledge of these than I possess would be necessary in order to determine the point.
Transplanted African folk-lore has a peculiar interest of its own, and one is very glad to find Mr. Jekyll doing for Jamaica what Mr. Chandler Harris, e.g. has done for Georgia. But the African element in the stories before us is far less evident than in "Uncle Remus," and is in many cases overlaid and inextricably mixed up with matter of European origin. At least eleven out of the fifty-one stories before us can be set down as imported, directly or indirectly, from Europe. I say directly or indirectly, because an examination of Chatelain's Folk-tales of Angola and Junod's Chants et Contes des Baronga shows that some tales, at any rate, have passed from Portugal to Africa. Such are La fille du Roi (Ronga), which is identical with Grimm's The Shoes that were danced to pieces, and with the Slovak-gypsy story of The Three Girls (Groome, Gypsy Folk-tales, p. 141). But in the absence of more detailed and direct evidence than we yet possess, it would be rash to assume that they have passed to America by way of Africa, rather than that they have been independently transmitted.
The eleven stories above referred to are: [II.] Yung-kyum-pyung, [III.] King Daniel, [VI.] Blackbird and Woss-woss, [X.] Mr. Bluebeard, [XVII.] Man-crow, [XVIII.] Saylan, [XXI.] Tacoma and the Old-witch Girl, [XXVI.] The Three Pigs, [XXXI.] Pretty Poll (another version of [III.]), [XXXIX.] Open Sesame (variant of [VI.]), [VII.] The Three Sisters. But some of these, as I hope to show presently, also have genuine African prototypes, and it is a question how far these fading traditions have been amalgamated with fairy-tales told to the slaves by the children of their European masters. The last named is one of a small group of tales ([VII.], [XXIV.], [XXXIV.], [L.]) which I cannot help referring to a common African original.
By far the greater number of the stories in this book, whether, strictly speaking, "Annancy stories" or not, come under the heading of animal-stories, and are of the same type as "Uncle Remus," Junod's "Roman du Lièvre," and numerous examples from various parts of Africa. It will be remembered that, in most of these, the difference between animals and human beings is not very clearly kept in view by the narrators. As M. Junod says, "Toutes les bêtes qui passent et repassent dans ces curieux récits représentent des êtres humains, cela va sans dire. Ils sont personnalisés par un procédé linguistique qui consiste à mettre devant le nom de l'animal un préfixe de la classe des hommes." (This is a point we must come back to later on.) "Ainsi mpfoundla, le lièvre ordinaire, devient dans le contes Noua-mpfoundla.... La Rainette, c'est Noua-chinana, l'Eléphant, Noua-ndlopfou.... Leurs caractères physiques particuliers sont présents devant l'imagination du conteur pour autant qu'ils donnent du pittoresque au récit. Mais on les oublie tout aussi aisément dès qu'ils ne sont plus essentiels à la narration." This feature constantly meets one in Bantu folk-lore: the hare and the elephant hire themselves out to hoe a man's garden; the swallow invites the cock to dinner and his wife prepares the food, in the usual native hut with the fireplace in the middle and the nsanja staging over it; the hare's wife goes to the river to draw water, and is caught by a crocodile; the tortoise carries his complaint to the village elders assembled in the smithy, and so on. M. Junod seems to me to overrate the conscious artistic purpose in the narrators of these tales: the native mind is quite ready to assume that animals think and act in much the same way as human beings, and this attitude makes it easy to forget the outward distinctions when they appear as actors in a story. No doubt this haziness of view is increased by the popular conception of metamorphosis as a possible occurrence in everyday life. When, as has more than once been the case, we find men firmly believing, not only that they can, under certain circumstances, turn into animals, but that they actually have done so, we may expect them to think it quite easy for animals to turn into men.
The prefix given by the Baronga to animals, when they are, so to speak, personified in tales, may seem a slight point, but it is not without interest. The Yaos in like manner give them the prefix Che (Che Sungula, the Rabbit, Che Likoswe, the Rat, etc.), which, though usually translated "Mr.," is of common gender and used quite as often in addressing women as men. In Chatelain's Angola stories the animals sometimes (not always) have the honorific prefix Na or Ngana, "Mr."; the latter is sometimes translated "Lord." In Luganda folk-lore the elephant (enjovu) is called Wa Njovu. In Zulu, Ucakijana (to whom we shall come back presently) is the diminutive form of i-cakide, the Weasel, put into the personal class. I do not recall anything similar in Nyanja tales, but cannot help connecting with the above the fact that animals, whatever class their names may belong to, are usually treated as persons in the tales. Not to be unduly technical, I would briefly explain that njobvu (elephant) and ng'ona (crocodile) would naturally take the pronoun i, but in the stories (and, I think, sometimes in other cases) they take a, which belongs to the first, or personal class. Now, the reader will notice how often the animals in the stories before us are distinguished as "Mr." or "Bro'er" (cf. pp. [20], [23], [31], [86], etc.), though the Jamaica people seem to be less uniformly polite in this respect than Uncle Remus. "Brer Rabbit" is so familiar as to be taken for granted, as a rule, without further question; but, years before he had become a household word in this country, we find a writer in Lippincott's Magazine[4] remarking, "The dramatis personæ are honoured with the title Buh, which is generally supposed to be an abbreviation of the word 'brother,' but it probably is a title of respect equal to our 'Mr.'" The "but" seems hardly called for, since both assertions are seemingly true. We might also compare the Zulu u Cakijana (1st class), who is human or quasi-human, while i-cakide (2nd class) is the name for the Weasel.
Annancy, then, is the Spider, and as such he is conceived throughout the folk-lore of West Africa. If he seems, as he continually does, to take on a human character, going to Freetown to buy a gun and powder (Cunnie Rabbit, p. 282), or applying to a "Mory man" for amulets (ib. p. 139), he only behaves like all other animals, as explained above. A Temne authority (ib. p. 93) maintains that "Spider was a person" in old times, and did not look the same as he does in these days, "he done turn odder kind of thing now." But this looks like an attempt at rationalising the situation, possibly in response to European inquiries. The change of shape alluded to at the end of the Temne Tar-baby episode is comparatively a minor matter: he was formerly "round lek pusson," but became flattened out through the beating he received while attached to the Wax Girl. In the Gold Coast stories, too, Anansi is quite as much a spider as Brer Rabbit is a rabbit; but in Jamaica, though he still retains traces of his origin, they are somewhat obscured—so much so that Mr. Jekyll speaks (pp. [4]-[5]) of the "metamorphic shape, that of the Spider," which he assumes, as though the human were his real form, the other only an occasional disguise. In "[Annancy and Brother Tiger]" we find that he has to "run up a house-top" to escape the revenge of the monkeys, which accounts for some of his habits to this day. In "[Yung-kyum-pyung]" (a version of Rumpelstilzchen, or Tom Tit Tot), the only hint of his spider character is contained in a mere allusion (quite external to the story) to his "running 'pon him rope." In "[Brother Death]," Annancy and all his family cling to the rafters, hoping to escape from Death; but it scarcely seems in character that they should be incapable of holding on long. They drop, one after another, Annancy last ([p. 33]). He is always in danger from Cows ([p. 107]): "Anywhere Cow see him, he reach him down with his mouth"; and he lives in a banana branch ([p. 119]) for fear of Calcutta Monkey and his whip. His moral character is consistently bad all through; he is a "clever thief"—greedy, treacherous, and cruel, but intellectually he does not uniformly shine. He has to call in the help of a wizard in his love affairs; "Monkey was too clever for him" on more than one occasion; he has to be extricated from the slaughter-house ([p. 23]) by Blackbird and his army of Wasps, and in "[Man-crow]" he is signally discomfited. In other cases his roguery is successful, and he is described as the greatest musician and "the biggest rascal in the world" ([p. 62]). Much the same is the character given to Mr. Spider in "Cunnie Rabbit." Not one amiable trait is recorded of him.
A Gold Coast story,[5] however, shows him arbitrating between a Rat and a Panther in very much the same way as the Yao Che Sungula settles the difficulty between the Man and the Crocodile,[6] making the latter go back into the trap whence he had too confidingly been released, in order to show how it was done. Once having got the ungrateful Panther back into the trap, the Spider advises the Rat to leave him there.
As there is a Gold Coast tradition which affirms the human race to be descended from the Spider,[7] it might be expected that he should sometimes appear in a more favourable light, and also that those peoples who had lost this myth, or never possessed it, should concentrate their attention on the darker side of his character. At the same time, even in what may be called his own home, he does not appear as infallible. A very curious story, given by Zimmermann in his Grammatical Sketch of the Akra or Gâ Language, shows us the Spider and his son in the character of the two sisters who usually figure in tales of the "Holle" type,[8] and, strangely enough, it is the father who, by his wilfulness and indiscretion, forfeits the advantages which the son has gained. During a time of famine the young spider crawls into a rat-hole in search of a nut which has rolled into it, and there meets with three unkempt and unwashed spirits, who desire him to peel some yams and cook the peelings. He does so, and they are changed into large yams. They give him a large basket of yams to carry home, and teach him a spell which is not to be imparted to any one else. He repeatedly obtains supplies from the same source, but at last is followed by his father, who insists on going in his stead. He derides and disobeys the spirits, loses his yams, and is flogged into the bargain.