The spider who owns all stories, carried from Ghana to the Caribbean and back into the world's library.
Documented
Akan origin, Atlantic crossing
Anansi tales are Akan property, documented in collections from the Gold Coast in the early twentieth century. The same spider appears in Jamaican, Surinamese, and wider Caribbean tale-cycles, carried across the Middle Passage and anchored there.
Assessment: Documented in the folktale record on both sides of the Atlantic. The migration of the story is itself history.
Stories
He bought the sky god's stories
The founding tale: Anansi pays Nyame's price, capturing hornets, a python, and a leopard through trickery, and in exchange all stories are named for him. Cunning, not strength, wins the archive.
Assessment: A charter myth for every underdog who could not win by force. Told as instruction as much as entertainment.
Interesting claims
A resistance manual in spider form
The claim: under slavery, Anansi stories functioned as a coded curriculum, teaching that the weak out-think the strong and that the master's rules can be turned on the master.
Assessment: Argued in earnest by scholars of African diaspora folklore. It explains the pattern of the tales better than coincidence does, and like all codes it cannot be fully proven from outside.
Sources and further reading
R.S. Rattray, Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (1930)
Beckwith, Jamaica Anansi Stories (1924)
Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey, on trickster traditions
Transatlantic folktale distribution studies
Worth asking
If the stories were the contraband, who was the smuggler?