the festival, and whatever remains is given to the village priest. The village is twelve miles from any railway or police station, and, on enquiry, it was found that the festival was unknown, to the authorities at Rome."
Hubert A. Freeman, F.S.A.
Ṅyankòpoṅ and Ananse in Gold Coast Folklore.
Who is Nyankopon? Who is Ananse? What is the connexion, if any, between Nyankopon and Ananse?—these are questions for which no satisfactory solution has yet been found. According to Ellis (Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, p. 24) Nyankopon "was the god of the Christians, borrowed from them and adopted under a new designation." Mr. A. S. Rattray (Ashanti Proverbs, pp. 17-24) expresses what is obviously the more correct view that Nyankopon or Onyàmé is one of the native gods.[1] Furthermore the Supreme Being has various sobriquets, Onyàmé pany in, Ananse Kokurokō, and these expressions are related to the Ananse (or spider) of the Ananse tales. Is then Mr. Spider, as Sir H. H. Johnston has said, merely "the emblem of more or less successful cunning and unscrupulous rapacity … the emblem of wicked cunning?" Or is Mr. Rattray correct when he suggests these stories probably had a religious or totemic origin?
The following extracts from a letter by a West Indian scholar who has lived many years among the natives, give the generally accepted native opinion of to-day. "Ananse and Ṅyankòpoṅ are distinct; the latter is a spirit—the Great Spirit or Friend—Ananse is purely a being of imagination supposed to be most cunning, and in fact possessing all the powers, wisdom, etc. of a god. One informant, however, said that Ananse was related to Nyankopon, another says that one of the principal founders of the tribe (i.e. the Tshi nation) was called Ananse and was a man." This latter statement agrees with what Bosman wrote; "The negroes call this spider Ananse and believe that the first men were made by this creature."
- ↑ See also Folk-lore, vol. xxviii., pp. 108-110.
