Anansi's Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World
Yepoka YeeboWhen Ghana won its independence from Britain in 1957, it instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists & rapacious Western interests determined to snatch any assets that colonialism hadn't already stripped. A CIA-funded military junta ousted the new nation's inspiring president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of hiding the country's gold overseas.
Into this big lie stepped one of history's most charismatic scammers, a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty in Ghana & trained in the United States, John Ackah Blay-Miezah declared himself custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece—if only you would "invest" in Blay-Miezah's fictitious efforts to release the equally fictitious fund. Over the 1970s & '80s, he & his accomplices-including Ghanaian state officials & Nixon's former attorney general--scammed hundreds of millions of dollars out of thousands of believers. Blay-Miezah lived in luxury, deceiving Philadelphia lawyers, London financiers, & Seoul businessmen alike, all while eluding his FBI pursuers. American prosecutors called his scam “one of the most fascinating--& lucrative--in modern history.”
In Anansi's Gold, Yepoka Yeebo chases Blay-Miezah's ever-wilder trail & discovers, at long last, what really happened to Ghana's missing wealth. She unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements, international finance, & postcolonial betrayal, revealing how what we call “history” writes itself into being, one lie at a time.