Tricksters: Hausa Spider Stories

This is a week devoted to the trickster spider; he goes by the name of Anansi (and its variants) in Akan and related languages in Ghana, but the spider has other names in other African languages. There are trickster spiders from many cultures in Africa! Today I wanted to feature some trickster spider stories from the Hausa tradition, where "Gizo" is the spider's name. One place you can find some Gizo stories is in this collection of Hausa stories translated by Neil Skinner: Hausa Tales and Traditions, which is just a click away at Internet Archive:

You will find over 250 stories in this book, starting with animal stories, and Spider gets to go first among the animals! You can see there are over 50 pages of Spider stories here:

Those animal stories are followed by stories about human characters and types, then moralizing stories, stories of men and women, a whole section of dilemma tales, and then stories involving legal disputes.

Skinner is translating the work of Frank Edgar, who published a monumental collection of Hausa stories (3 volumes of Tatsuniyoyi Na Hausa), and who also left behind a massive collection of unpublished Hausa writings. Edgar's work began in 1910, translating materials that he received from J. A. Burdon, and then Edgar himself began collecting Hausa stories in Nigeria, intended to provide British civil servants with materials for studying Hausa language and learning about Hausa culture. If you want to see the Hausa texts by Frank Edgar, you can hop on over to Hathi Trust, where all three volumes are available (being in the public domain): 

There is an index in the back of Skinner's book that you can use to locate where to find Edgar's stories in Skinner's book:

Likewise, if you are reading in Skinner's book, each story contains a reference to Edgar, as you can see here, where the story about Spider and Hyena points you to story #108 in the third volume of Edgar about Gizo and Kura!

So, enjoy the treasure-trove of Spider stories in Skinner's book at Internet Archive, knowing you can also find the Hausa texts online too, all just a click away thanks to the power of digital libraries.

Hausa Tales and Traditions

by Neil Skinner