Anansi's Gold: The man who swindled the world

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THE GUY FROM GHANA: John Blay-Miezah, a cigar-smoking and charismatic young man from Ghana, had big ideas and big plans. He traveled to Philadelphia, New York, and London—and told an unbelievable tale. Many assumed that the story was so unbelievable that it must be true. His story unfolds after the ousting of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-independence leader, by a military coup in 1966. Rumours swirled that Nkrumah had stashed the nation’s gold overseas. No one was quite sure how much the gold was worth: perhaps hundreds of millions, billions or even tens of billions of dollars. The stories were probably nonsense, but many Ghanaians believed them.

But it was also important to tell the history. Nkrumah has long seemed outlandishly corrupt – and he wasn’t. But that didn’t stop people; it was just accepted without evidence. Rawlings actively tried to murder my father, who was a minor politician at the time. My parents had friends who were disappeared and when I started asking about this period it was pretty clear they had post-traumatic stress and that really broke my heart. This is a truly beautiful book - a work of non-fiction with the pace and tension of a thriller. The research is breathtaking: secret files, private letters, recordings of Blay-Miezah, interviews with pretty much everyone who's still alive. The writing is glorious. The images - many by the brilliant Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, some published here for the first time - conjure a vanished world. This captivating story of a gifted con artist and his international network of abettors is not only a sheer pleasure to read, but also a profound inquiry into how a lie can become a legend. Yepoka Yeebo's tenacious reporting and relentless pursuit of the truth are nothing short of heroicBlay-Miezah was born poor but made his way as a young man to America. There he got a taste for enterprise and sensed a golden opportunity. He buzzed around America, Europe and Asia—always staying in swanky hotels, always on someone else’s dime—peddling the story that he had been made custodian of Nkrumah’s trust fund for the gold. He promised that those who funded his efforts to retrieve the bounty would share handsomely in it. The gold, of course, never appeared. T or F? In 1971, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger notified every American diplomatic mission with a warning about Blay-Miezah’s apparent frauds. “In February 1974, Blay-Miezah’s investors started visiting Accra. By rights, this should have been the end of his scam—instead, it turned the investors from believers to evangelists.”

This astonishing book reveals some of the most important global events of the twentieth century' Afua HirschDiplomats, Nixon associates and businessmen – as well as humble mom-and-pop investors – had bought into Blay-Miezah’s claims. He said that he had been in Bucharest, at the deathbed of Nkrumah, who entrusted him with the hidden riches of Ghana, which declared independence in 1957. (At the time of Nkrumah’s death, Blay-Miezah was actually thousands of miles away, serving time in a prison outside Philadelphia.) It’s a great story, but none of it was true. Blay-Miezah was a liar and a con man who spent decades distorting the history of his country to bilk investors who thought they’d get a piece of that treasure.