Philosophy and Heroism: The Literary Perspective of Yaw Asare’s Ananse in the Land of the Idiots

Abstract

This paper investigates the academic implication of Western influence on the study of Ghanaian oral literature and the extent to which literature in Ghana is “indigenized”, especially in the area of drama as addressed in Nana Yaw Asare’s Ananse in the Land of the Idiots. As the iron walls of Metropolitan English begin to show cracks, there is now a new development that brings new imaginations crucial for critically looking at the Ghanaian folklore as a literary piece. Using the ethnographic and the stylistic approaches for this study, one of the results of these new imaginations is to investigate “anansesεm” text as both drama and narrative. From that perspective, one of the findings in this paper is that Ananse, whose behavior makes people taxonomize “anansesεm” as a trickster folklore, far from being a trickster, is a real philosopher and cultural hero. Other findings are that the very behavior that qualifies Ananse to be called a trickster is indeed an Akan philosophical expression of how to survive in a secular world and that among the Akans, thinking right is highly prized, failure of which does not only bring about the doom of the perpetrator but that of the entire community. Again, the current moral thought in Ghana is based on the fact that religion is a Western invention and that the real moral thought of the Ghanaian as a social or a secular being as demonstrated by Ananse leads to the conclusion that corruption is the result of weak cultural thinking structures. The Akan folklore therefore has a lot to offer in terms of literature if treated as a locally produced text.

The Textuality of “Anansesεm”: A Pedagogical and Ideological Resource in Traditional Human Relations among the Akans in Ghana

“…For Ananse, there is nothing like trial test and if you do not perform, that is your doom; a reflection of real life situation. When he wants the stories, he goes to the Sky God and the sky is a symbol of authority in the Akan culture (Arthur, 2020). He therefore goes for not only permission but inspiration as well.…”

“…The only difference is its geographical origin; it is not a western phenomenon but African. This difference could be a very slippery ground when it comes to treating it as a genuine literary genre because there are not enough theories to cover it, at least in Africa, and hence its restricted if not non-existent use in schools in Ghana (Arthur, 2020). It is therefore all right to talk of it in ordinary man's language but investing it with the allure of intellectual discourse poses problems to some Ghanaian scholars.…”

“…Of course, the folktale as folklore coming under cultural studies belongs to anthropology but a study of the text belongs to literature, even though there are still grey areas when it comes to definition. However, Dundes, the father of folkloristics, is very emphatic that the study of folklore is in literature and for him "the definition of the materials and the discipline should become clearer as the relationships between the study of folklore and the study of literature and anthropology" (Arthur, 2020) are fully explored. In the Departments of English, the folktale is considered as performance which Richard Bauman alludes to as being oral literary texts (Bauman, 1977), the texts are frozen to permanence in the form of recording, transcribing or by writing.…”