A Story A Story is a tale from Africa which explains how stories came to be. This African tale uses native language and beautiful drawings to describe the culture in which the story is about. This tale is a ‘spider story’; many African tales are referred to by this title because the ‘spider man’ released these tales from the sky god. The main character, Ananse is the ‘spider man’ himself. This tale describes how Ananse bartered with the sky god for stories to be released from being locked up in the sky. Ananse used his gift of making webs and spun one high into the sky to meet with the sky god. There, the sky god demanded that he receive a tiger, hornets, and a fairy as a price for the stories. This ‘spider tale’ goes on to tell how Ananse fought these creatures and tied them in his web as a trade to the sky god. Ananse outwitted each one of these powerful creatures and offered them to the sky god. Success of small creatures against powerful ones by using wit is a theme throughout most ‘spider stories’. The sky god loved his gifts and had his nobles come out for a celebration as he released stories to every place on earth. And that is how stories came to be!
I would use this book in my classroom to introduce the African culture. The language and drawings all are reflections of this culture. Phrases that are specific to African language are used; for example, when something is really small in Africa they may use repetition and write 'small' multiple times. It would be neat to use this as a resource for identifying how other cultures use literary tools such as repetition.
