The best-known Ananse myth explains why stories themselves bear his name. In the tale, all the world's stories once belonged to the sky-god Nyame, and Ananse asked to buy them; Nyame set an impossible price, to capture a set of dangerous creatures, among them a python, hornets and a leopard, and Ananse, by wit and trickery rather than strength, caught each one and won the stories, so that in Akan a folk-tale is anansesem, "spider-words." This makes Ananse a culture-hero as well as a trickster: he brings the stories, and with them a kind of wisdom, to humankind.
As the study of West African tricksters emphasises, his cunning is double-edged, in countless tales he uses greed and deceit to outmatch stronger creatures, and about as often is undone by his own cleverness, and that ambivalence is the point, a figure who is at once spider and man, divine son of Nyame and earth, wise and foolish together.