Winner of the Jhalak Prize * Winner of the Plutarch Award for Biography

When Ghana won its independence from Britain in 1957, it instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and 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 and 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 and '80s, he and his accomplices-including Ghanaian state officials and 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, and Seoul businessmen alike, all while eluding his FBI pursuers. American prosecutors called his scam “one of the most fascinating--and lucrative--in modern history.”

In Anansi's Gold, Yepoka Yeebo chases Blay-Miezah's ever-wilder trail and discovers, at long last, what really happened to Ghana's missing wealth. She unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements, international finance, and postcolonial betrayal, revealing how what we call “history” writes itself into being, one lie at a time.

BIO

Yepoka Yeebo’s work has appeared in the Guardian, Huffington Post, the Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek and Quartz, among other publications. A graduate of Queen Mary, University of London and of Columbia University's School of Journalism, she divides her time between Accra, London and New York. Anansi’s Gold is her first book.

REVIEWS

"Reading Anansi's Gold is like watching a heist movie . . . all about improvisation, unforced error, unlikely escape.” -- Dan Piepenbring, Harper's

“An enthralling rags-to-stolen-riches story, a thrilling true-crime caper, and a sharp indictment of a world that allows scammers like Blay-Miezah to thrive.” -- TIME

"Riveting.” -- New York Times Book Review

“Skillfully interweaves archival material, F.B.I. records, and interviews to recount the saga of [a] con man's career, and to reflect on how lies can be leveraged in the creation of national histories.” -- The New Yorker

“[T]his little-known story unfolds like Catch Me if You Can.” -- The Washington Post

“The sprawling story of Blay-Miezah's outsize life and wayward career is told with mordant aplomb by first-time author Yepoka Yeebo … While [the book] reflects a daunting amount of research, it reads like a picaresque novel … Compelling.” -- The Wall Street Journal

[P]  Bloomsybury Publishing  /  April 22, 2025

1.2" H x 8.2" L x 5.5" W (0.9 lbs) 400 pages