Specimens of Folk-lore of the Gã-people on the Gold Coast

Though the Gã are rich in folk-lore, proverbs, fables, and idiomatic sayings which refer to tribal customs, it is difficult to know just how many of these have been borrowed from the Twi—a good many, to judge by the extent to which Twi enters into their stories and songs. If a story has in it any sort of chant or ‘catch-phrase’, it is nearly always in Twi that that part is given, or Twi corrupted or mixed with Gã. Most of their tales are animal stories, and the Spider is always the clever and cunning villain of the piece, who gets caught in his own web, just as in the Brer Rabbit stories the fox gets caught in his own toils.