African Folktales at Internet Archive: Ananse the Spider

There was a wonderful Ananse item in yesterday's post about Tololwa Mollel, and here's another Ananse book for this week of west African tricksters: Ananse the Spider: Tales from an Ashanti Village by Peggy Appiah, just a click away at the Internet Archive.

You might remember Peggy Appiah from an earlier blog post, when I wrote about her wonderful book Tales of an Ashanti Father. 

I included some links in that post with information about her remarkable life and, yes, she is the mother of Kwame Anthony Appiah; some of his books are also available for checkout at the Internet Archive.

For this post, I want to say something about the lovely artwork in this Ananse book. The illustrations are by Peggy Wilson (Mora Dickson had done the illustrations in the other book). I haven't been able to find out anything more about her, but I really like this design style; here are two of the full-page illustrations:

There are so many excellent Ananse (Anansi) stories in this book, so if you are looking to learn more about the most famous of the west African tricksters, this book is a great option. We are also so lucky that Internet Archive has a copy; this is a rare book, hard to find... as with hard-to-find books, Amazon lists it for hundreds of dollars:

But now anyone can check out a copy online!

Ananse the Spider:
Tales from an Ashanti Village
by Peggy Appiah