julia in madagascar

When I was little, my father would tell me countless Ananse stories. These were Ghanaian tales about a cunning spider called Ananse, who was full of greed and selfish ambition and who would seek out any opportunity to gain knowledge, wealth or food for himself at the expense of others in his village. However, every story would end with his failure and demise, because the moral of the story would be that ultimately, selfish ambition does not succeed no matter how cunning the plan. I wish this were true of our world, I wish we actually believed prosperity comes with greater solidarity and community social action, I wish  we weren’t taught that in the real world, those that get ahead have to leave others behind and make sure they stay behind. I learnt something about this during my time in Madagascar.

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