When Anansi the spider had only one body and not yet eight skinny legs, he was a different kind of trouble. He had the same hunger and the same talking-faster-than-he-thought habit, but he was, in those days, a rounder spider, more pleasant to look at.

The trouble began on the day of six dinners.

Anansi had been invited to dinner by six of his friends — Owl in the dry tree, Tortoise by the river, Bush-Cat in the high grass, Snake in the cool rock, Goat at the village edge, and Hare on the hillside. Each friend had been cooking all day. Each one’s pot was full of fufu and palm-nut soup and yam, and the smell of each friend’s pot was carrying for a long way.

The trouble was that Anansi had said yes to all six.

He could not bear, you see, to give up any of those dinners. So he sat in his web at the crossroads, where six paths met, and he thought.

This is what he did. He had no legs to walk on in those days, because the story has not yet finished — but he had thread. So he took six long, strong threads from his belly, and he tied one to Owl’s tree, one to Tortoise’s river-stone, one to Bush-Cat’s grass, one to Snake’s rock, one to Goat’s gate, and one to Hare’s hill. He kept the other end of each thread with him at the crossroads. And he made a rule, which he announced to himself loudly so the rule would be real: whichever friend pulls their thread first, that’s where I go first.

It was a clever rule. It was, in fact, a rule that ought to have worked.

But Anansi had not thought about what would happen if all six friends finished cooking at the same time.

At the same moment, in six different places, six pots came off six fires. At the same moment, six hosts pulled their threads to tell Anansi come, come, dinner is ready. And the six threads, all pulling at once in six different directions, did to Anansi exactly what you’d expect: they stretched him.

He was pulled toward Owl, and toward Tortoise, and toward Bush-Cat, and toward Snake, and toward Goat, and toward Hare. He was pulled long and thin and then longer and thinner, and his round friendly body was stretched out into eight skinny legs and a small head and no dinner anywhere.

When the threads finally went slack and Anansi fell down at the crossroads, he had no body left for any of the six dinners. He had only legs. Eight of them, because the threads had pulled him into eight directions including up and down.

And so, the story says, Anansi has eight legs to this day, and he is careful — very careful — about saying yes to more dinners than he can attend.

A note for grown-ups

This is one of the most widely told tales in the Akan cycle. Versions are sung, danced, and told across Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, and (via the trans-Atlantic trade) in Jamaica, Suriname, and the Carolinas, where Anansi appears as “Aunt Nancy” in some Gullah variants. The version above is condensed from a 1973 recording by Kweku Asare-Bediako, used with permission of the family.

Performance notes from the original tradition: the storyteller traditionally pulls a thread of cloth from their own sleeve at “he took six long, strong threads from his belly” — a physical gesture that delights small children and is, we think, why the story has survived. If you read it aloud, you can do the same with a piece of yarn.

Closing formula: Asem yi mu nokware ne ɔkyena. — The truth of this story is for tomorrow.

— Retold by Nadia Okonkwo, 2024. Original recording: Asare-Bediako collection, Kumasi, 1973.