Anansi and the Demons

I have been loving Shirley Anne Tate’s book Decolonising Sambo, which studies a global phenomenon she calls the “white sambo psyche”. This involves the way in which “white” colonialists all over the world project stereotypical conceptions onto “Black” people.

I put “white” and “Black” into quotation marks to clarify that there are no such humans. As an example, I can take myself. In today’s United States, I am “white”.

But my ancestors came from the Pale of Settlement, in Russia/Belorussia/Poland. One shtetl (village) of their origin was Mstislavl. My great-great-great grandfather Movsha Leites was a notary who participated in The Mstislavl Rebellion. In the 1840s, a regional governor was abusing his authority to excessively draft Jews into the Czar’s army, and the Jews of Mstislavl engaged in resistance. Movsha Leites was punished by having his hair and beard forcibly shaved into a checkerboard pattern—a terrible punishment for an Orthodox Jew.

In that place, at that time, was it of any significance that Movsha Leites was or wasn’t “white”? No. That wasn’t the category of significance. Certainly, as far as the Russians were concerned, he was not “white”, he was a Jew.

Yet here in the United States in 2025, I’m a citizen who has “white privilege”. Nobody’s gonna shave my head into a checkerboard pattern, or forcibly draft me into the army. I can legally own property, and I’m not restricted to living within specific geographic boundaries.

My various grandparents and great-grandparents obtained these rights for me, when they left their homes and families, between 1880 and 1922. Here in the United States, over the course of the 20th century, my family became “white”. We joined the settler colonialist takeover of this continent. 

“Whiteness” is not inherent in any human. Every “white” person has an “ethnic” origin that precedes their “whiteness”. The same is true of “Blackness”. It is the processes of world history that have produced “white” and “Black” humans.

In Decolonising Sambo, Shirley Anne Tate elucidates many of the specifics of these processes, over the past several hundred years, all over the globe.

*** 

This year I wrote a book, You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read This Book, and I set it up on Ingram Spark’s print-on-demand platform; it’s self-published. I can upload revised versions, if I want to—even though it’s fully released and available to buy.

I thought my book was finished. But things keep happening that make me feel like I need to revise the book. This week, several things happened that made me decide I needed to revise Chapter 4, which is entitled, “Authors Fight: Why Is Little Black Sambo Banned?

First, I’d mailed a copy of my book to Gloria Jean Pinkney, wife of the illustrator of Sam and the Tigers: A New Telling of Little Black Sambo, Jerry Pinkey. Then this week, I got a phone call from Gloria Jean Pinkney. We spoke for an hour, and then had a lengthy text-message exchange.

Then, a few days later—as a result of my conversation with Gloria Jean—I wrote a long email about Sam and the Tigers to Shirley Anne Tate, author of Decolonising Sambo, and she wrote me back.

I’m not going to describe these conversations here. But what I do want to explain is that I have had several big realizations. Most significantly I have discovered something that no-one knows, and which I cannot prove. I don’t even know how I’d prove it.

If I were a professor, like Shirley Anne Tate, I could not simply publish my idea, because I have no evidence. But I am just a bookseller, out here on my own. And I’m going to publish it. I already have inserted it into Chapter 4.

My idea relates to the character of Sambo in the book Little Black Sambo.

Recall, this is a child who while wearing fancy clothes, is threatened by a series of Tigers, and gives each tiger an article of his clothing. Each tiger prances in the clothing and does not eat Sambo.

“And the Tiger said to him, ‘Little Black Sambo, I’m going to eat you up!’ And Little Black Sambo said, ‘Oh! Please Mr. Tiger, don’t eat me up, and I’ll give you my beautiful little Red Coat.’ So the Tiger said, ‘Very well, I won’t eat you this time, but you must give me your beautiful little Red Coat.’ So the Tiger got poor Little Black Sambo’s beautiful little Red Coat, and went away saying, ‘Now I’m the grandest Tiger in the Jungle.’”

Then, the tigers quarrel about which is the fanciest, and they end by chasing each other so fast that they melt into butter. Sambo then collects his clothing again.

For me, the strange thing is that Sambo doesn’t seem to have any clear intent in mind, when he gives away his clothes. The tigers are placated by his gifts in a way that’s unstimulated by any plan on Sambo’s part.

Here is my realization: the author Helen Bannerman spent ten years of her early childhood, in the 1870s, on the island of Madeira, off the coast of Africa. (Her father was a minister for the Scottish enclave there.) I believe that as a child, Helen Bannerman heard a West African folktale. I believe this folktale was “Anansi and the Demons”. (I made up this name.)

In the folktale “Anansi and the Demons”, the well-known spider trickster Anansi has decked himself out in some gorgeous jewels and flowers and is showing off in the jungle. A terrifying demon approaches and threatens to eat Anansi. But the clever Anansi says, “Take this wreath of flowers and you’ll be the most impressive demon in the jungle!” The demon is so delighted with his appearance that he goes to show off his new necklace to the other demons. Meanwhile, a second demon approaches Anansi and threatens to eat him, but Anansi says, “Take this crown of jewels and you’ll be the most impressive demon in the jungle!”

After this recurs several times, the demons come face to face with one another, and they fight because each is convinced that he is the most impressive. They all destroy one another, and Anansi then recovers his fancy stuff.

The difference between “Anansi and the Demons” and Little Black Sambo is that Anansi is wily and uses flattery to cleverly stoke the demons’ mutual jealousy. That’s why the demons are destroyed. But Sambo exhibits none of these foresighted, intelligent traits. He survives because although childlike, he is lucky. The tigers become jealous of each other on their own. 

Anansi the Spider Trickster is neither Black nor white—he’s a universal archetype.

Helen Bannerman projected her “white sambo psyche” onto Anansi, disempowering him, rendering him childlike.

Helen Bannerman’s self-proclaimed “whiteness” splinters trickster Anansi, releasing Bannerman’s (and our) Black Sambo.

I can’t prove it.