Anansi reverts to spider form to elude capture.

Garcia continued to collect tales after his grandfather’s death out of a desire to “rescue” and maintain the African culture of Ecuador.  With the help of a grant from the Inter-American Foundation, he has traveled up and down the rivers of Ecuador and to the Chota Valley filling over fifteen hundred cassette tapes with stories and poetry.  Now fifty years old, he is the only person in Ecuador who has extensively collected Afro-Ecuadorian oral tradition.

In 1992, Garcia participated in the Maroon component of the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife.  On a video produced the same year by Arlington Education Television-AETV, he comments that one of the highlights of his experience at the festival was a storytelling session with Maroon descendants from Suriname, Colombia, French Guiana, Jamaica, Mexico, and Texas.  Each told round after round of Anansi stories in his own language: Spanish, English, French, and four creole tongues.  Some of the stories were the same, some were new, and all had the essential qualities of a traditional African Anansi story.

Anansi stories are trickster tales.  They came to the Americas from the Akan people of Ghana.  In the Akan stories, Anansi is a spider.  In the Americas, the stories evolved to the point that Anansi is sometimes a spider and sometimes a man.  When he gets in trouble as a man, he often reverts to his spider form and hides.  In most of the stories he dupes other animals in a good-natured way, and other times he is duped.  Folklorists agree that, allowing for some changes that occurred because of cultural encounters in the areas where the Africans were living, the Anansi stories remain relatively untouched.

Anansi tales can be found in significant numbers everywhere Africans ended up in the Americas, except in the United States.