I have already spoken of my freelance work with groups of people, in particular the Coping With Violence course.
A meeting with two Eastern European mushroom gatherers in the New Forest in October 2013 reminded me of Anansi.
Sometime in the late 1980s I was facilitating a series of team building days with a staff group of residential social workers at varying levels in the hierarchy. I very soon realised I had my work cut out because most of these people only met during handover periods; no two individuals shared the same nationality, gender, racial characteristics or sexual orientation; and there were 17 of them. Deep seated prejudices prevented any meaningful communication.
By the end of the first day it was all in danger of going horribly wrong. Racking my brains overnight, I came up with the idea of the West African mythical storyteller, and Little Miss Muffet.
Abandoning the programme I had prepared earlier, I took a flip-chart and drew a spider hanging from a web on the large sheet of paper. I asked the group members to tell us what they thought and felt when seeing this drawing. As always, it took a minute or two for the first volunteer to tell us about her thoughts. Slowly, people began to rush to tell theirs. And eventually fear or reverence could be expressed.
Anansi, the spider, is loved for his storytelling; whereas it was a spider who ‘frightened Miss Muffet away’.
On another sheet of paper I portrayed a set of cricket stumps with a West Indian male wicket-keeper crouching behind them. I went on to tell of Tony Pinder, the best keeper who ever received my bowling, and how he and his brother Winston, who, when I began playing club cricket in 1957 had been the first black people I had ever met. I spoke of their influence on me, and, in particular, the father figure that Winston, known as Bunny, had struck.
I had their interest. This waned momentarily when I invited them to take their turns at drawing anything relevant to their culture or history that they would like to tell us about. That was scary. However, the floodgates soon opened. At the end of the day many people had not had time for a turn, but all wanted to spend the following, last, day finishing the task. Many brought their own art materials.
Then came what, to me, was the greatest, and most satisfying, surprise. A white Central European woman and a black African man both described mushroom gathering from their childhoods. They realised that they had, after all, something in common. I have always hoped that the team continued to build on the discoveries that emerged from these exercises. Once we accept our differences and look beyond them, we are quite similar, really.