Myth, Migrancy and the Metropole: Akan-African Folktales as a Mythocolonial Syntax of Survival

Abstract

The quest for food has long been documented as a key structural paradigm in the African folktale tradition. The Akan AnansesꜪm, a subset of the tradition, does not deviate from this structural pattern. Many distinguished grammarians of the Akan folktale—Lee Haring (1972), Roger D. Abrahams (1983: 3), Ruth Minott Egglestone (2001), Lewis Hyde (1998: 20), Amissah-Arthur (2019)—maintain that the food trope represents the focal point around which the Ananse tale is organised. In spite of the above, there has been very minimal attempt to link the food quest to postcolonial African economic hardship and the economic migrancy that results from it. The present paper re-reads Ananse tales through the cross-disciplinary lenses of structural, postcolonial and mythopoetic theories to arrive at the conclusion that African folktales essentially provide a formulaic response to the existential hardship at home, or predict it. The tales demonstrate archetypal agency by revealing how the protagonists travel to the dangerous outskirts of the village or, defying all physical and metaphysical odds, venture into the forbidden forest of Sasabonsam, the archetypal Akan monster, to seek for a solution to the hunger at home. It is our argument that, whether they go by aircraft or rickety dinghy, whether by automobile or on foot across the Sahara Desert, whether they stow away, or travel legally, postcolonial Africans who migrate to Europe, America and elsewhere, in search for existential fulfilment are unconsciously re-enacting the quest for food as pertains in the Akan-African folktales. We suggest that the structural pattern of the tales Africans listen to as children provides a syntax for surviving threatening economic situations. The pattern furnishes a psychological blueprint for African self-preservation which unconsciously influences postcolonial Africans migratory practices.