I haven’t done these in a long, long time, but I just found a book of Anansi stories on Amazon, and I’ll be posting a few of these a week to practice for the interviews I need to do over the next few weeks.

So, to start, here is ‘Anansi and the Gum Doll’.

Those of you who grew up somewhere other than Africa might recognize this story as being the same as ‘The Tar Baby‘ which is the Uncle Remus version of the same story. Most of the Anansi stories have a matching story in Southern US folklore, although for a variety of reasons most of these have picked up racist overtones over the last 200 years. This is one of many reasons that I prefer the Anansi stories.