Story-telling is a form of entertainment very popular among Ghanaians. Of the many stories that one may hear, there is a particular cycle that has come to be identified with the fictitious character Ananse, the spider-man or man-spider. These are the stories known as Anansesem, the stories of Ananse. Kweku Ananse symbolizes shrewdness and cunning. In Akan mythology, he is the younger brother of Nyankopon, the great god of the sky. Unlike his brother, however, Kwaku Ananse is more earthy. His greed knows no end. A figure of fun, he seems at his best when engaged in some mischief. But like all mischief makers, he often ends up in trouble and disgrace, thus earning the laughter and scorn of mankind.
Although identifying Ananse as an important character in Akan mythology, the intertitle claims Ananse as an important national figure, suppressing other ethnic identities, languages, oral discourses, and mythologies while claiming a shared national culture and oral literature. The reference to “Ghanaians” has a double function here. It is, to borrow a phrase from Homi Bhabha (1994), pedagogical and performative, asserting an ethnographic “truth” about Ghanaians and, in that, producing “Ghanaian” as a national identity. Ghanaians are doubly inscribed; described and addressed, their national identity is the subject and product of the enunciation.
In No Tears for Ananse it is the direct address of a traditional storyteller, played by Ernest Abbeyquaye, that frames the Ananse story and invites the film audience into “a familiar community of meaning” (Vasudevan 2001, 149). The architecture of these opening and closing segments theatricalizes space to reenact a storytelling event for two audiences: the diegetic audience (the audience within the world of the film) seated around the storyteller and the film audience located in the film theater. Placed in a position external to the Ananse story he will tell, centered frontally, and standing among a large group of rapt listeners, the storyteller looks directly into the camera when he introduces his tale. An ensemble of traditional drummers and dancers, located behind him and to the side, punctuates his address. The camera, tilted slightly upward, places the film audience among the crowd of listeners, who appear in a brief cutaway sequence. Here the camera pans across the faces of the listeners as they laugh, nod, and smile, representing the audience as the nation, heterogeneous, including the old and young, men and women, and happily unified around this cultural performance. The film’s creation of a storytelling event, a culturally familiar and culturally coded arena of meaning, opens a national space, shared by Ghanaians within and external to the film, that, significantly, affirms the idea of community found in the Ananse narrative.
The mode of spectatorial address shifts with the actual telling of the Anansesem. Rendered through Hollywood-style narration that uses continuity editing to invoke the grammar of realism, the narrative of the Ananse story positions the spectator fully within the story’s “real” world. Set in an unspecified past, the narrative moves between the perspectives of Ananse and his son Kwaku Tsin. It chronicles the avaricious Ananse’s ploy to trick his wife Okonnor, his son, and their village into believing that he is dead so that he can harvest and eat all of the food grown on the family farm. Ananse, feigning sudden sickness, asks his wife, upon what he claims is his approaching death, to grant him a last wish: “When I die, don’t bury me in a grave. Lie me on a pyre on the farm and build a hut around my body.” Ananse dies in Okonnor’s arms, and in the following days, the entire village mourns and partakes in the funeral rites and festivities. Taken to his farm on the pyre and left to meet his ancestors, Ananse, very much among the living, sneaks out of his hut each evening to pick ripe tomatoes, ground eggs, and cassava and prepare for himself a plentiful feast. While enjoying a large bowl of soup, he remarks, “How I pity all family men who have to share their food and never get the chance to put on a bit of fat.” When Okonnor and Tsin return to the farm several weeks later, they find their plants picked clean. Furious, Tsin vows to find the “scoundrel” who has been “feeding fat” on his father’s farm and devises an elaborate ploy to capture the thief. Kwaku Tsin carves a human figure from a large piece of wood, paints the statue with a thick and sticky sap, and places it on the farm, where he is certain the thief will find it. The foolish Ananse sees the figure and, mistaking it for a man, attempts to slap and kick it. When he makes contact with the sappy glue, of course, he sticks. Unable to free himself from the figure, he is captured by Tsin, who returns the next morning with his mother to check the trap he has set.
After Tsin captures the thief, he immediately informs the entire village, whose members run to the farm to find Ananse caught in his own son’s trap. Point-of-view editing again aligns the camera with the crowd whose members heckle Ananse, and in the final scene, when the storyteller returns to impart the story’s lesson to his listeners, Ananse’s exposure and his shame, and therefore the story’s moral, are linked to Ananse’s “suffer[ing] in the eyes of his own wife and child,” and, importantly to the disapproval and sanction of the community. The storyteller, looking into the camera, imparts the film’s lesson: “Thus, Kwaku Ananse was exposed. And his greed brought upon him greater shame than any other man ever suffered in the eyes of his own wife and child. Take heed then to all who will listen.” The architecture of the film aligns, in censure, the gazes of the Ananse’s family, his community, the storyteller and his audience, and, significantly, the film spectators in the dark film theater. In this way, it organizes “a circuit of imaginary communication, indeed, a making of audience into imaginary community” (Vasudevan 2001, 149). The mixed modes of narration deployed in the film position the spectator “both inside and outside the story, tied at one moment to the seamless flow of a character-based narration from within, in the next attuned to a culturally familiar stance from without” (150).
The same year, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation released Hamile the Tongo Hamlet (1964), a Ghanaian retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Set in the village of Tongo in northern Ghana among the Gurunsi, the film, made in English, adheres closely to the original text. Only the location and characters’ names have been changed: Hamlet has become Hamile, played by Kofi Middleton-Mends; Ophelia is Habiba, played by Mary Yirenkyi, and Polonius is called Ibrahim and acted by Ernest Abbequaye. The film features performers from the University of Ghana School of Music and Drama, many of whom appeared in No Tears for Ananse and other GFIC releases. Its screenplay was written by Terry Bishop, an English national who was a close friend of Sean Graham’s, and the film was produced by the Ghanaian writer Joe de Graft, who throughout the course of his career directed many Shakespearean plays.
Based on a stage performance premiered earlier in the year, Hamile was made for inclusion in the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival in London and was de Graft’s first attempt at adapting one of Shakespeare’s major plays to a Ghanaian context (Agovi 1992, 5). As explained by Kofi Ermeleh Agovi, “De Graft was attempting to extend the dimensions of the Ghanaian theater to accommodate a universal experience in a distinctly Ghanaian setting” (5). Like similar assimilations of Shakespeare produced by first generation Africa writers in many former British colonies, the Africanizing of Shakespeare by well-educated members of the African elite was meant to demonstrate Africa’s civility and humanity (Johnson 1998; Gikandi 2004). It grew out of and reproduced the colonial idea that British literary culture represented a shared humanity. The re-creation of Shakespeare in Ghana, as in other parts of British colonial Africa, was bound up with the assertion of a national identity and culture. Gikandi explains: “To the extent that African nationalism justified its political claims through the invocation of the essential humanity of the colonized, the production of a literary culture was conceived as an important step in sanctioning the case for African rights and freedoms” (2004, 387). The film received a tepid response from the local press and local audiences. The Weekly Spectator, for example, described the film as “a bit high-browed” and criticized it for being unlike The Boy Kumasenu, which is reported to have “gone down well with the public” (June 4, 1966).
With little revenue, diminishing resources,