The ANANSI
And just like the Anansi, Project Anansi is dedicated to weaving together stories from diverse communities, ensuring they are told with authenticity and preserved for future generations. The spider’s resilience and ability to adapt mirror our goals – empowering storytellers to create, archive, and share their narratives on a global scale.
Anansi, the spider, is a powerful folktale character from West Africa. He is the symbol of wisdom, creativity, and storytelling in Akan folklore, and is best known as the master trickster and a keeper of stories. As a symbol of folktales and storytelling, Anansi represents the art of weaving narratives that connect communities and preserve cultural heritage.
Meet Sena the Filmmaker
I’m a documentary filmmaker and video journalist from Ghana. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of traveling across Africa, bringing to life countless beautiful stories and narratives that shape our continent. These stories, I have shared through documentary films and photos, including dozens of news features for Voice of America and BBC’s Travel Show.
But throughout my journeys, I’ve come face to face with a stark reality: many of the stories I’ve encountered – stories of power, culture, innovation, trade, economics, the environment, and more – have either been told incorrectly by visitors like myself, diluted over time, or lost entirely through oral transmission and the passage of generations.
These stories represent a vast and invaluable history, a resource that’s slipping away as time marches on. So I thought to myself, what if we could train and equip communities to tell and archive their own stories? What if we could preserve these narratives with authenticity and respect, ensuring they remain intact for future generations? These thoughts inspired the
idea and birthed the vision behind the PROJECT ANANSI – a global initiative aimed at empowering communities to document, preserve, and share their stories.
Allow me to take you on a journey through how we are going to raise global filmmakers and storytellers while creating the largest collection of stories, research data, and cultural archives the world has ever seen. Together, we’ll build a future where every story matters, and every voice is heard
