Yepoka Yeebo — Anansi's Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World - with Marcia Chatelain

After winning independence in 1957, Ghana instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and rapacious Western interests determined to snatch any assets that British colonialism hadn't already stripped. A CIA-funded military junta ousted the 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 around the world. 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 wild 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.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639735297?ic_referral=akeRCMKFTlDEKd3mwYYCHdG9xxj_oVP1U62RwJJ6kjswM3Ox8a67Gu_MqaQ7NfcRipRbKn629i2aoi6cbx9zqDvVyGv0qyTpbio9TYYJLKaFiHyfUhBefP2xV0w6u0EFH9r9TgYepoka 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.Yeebo is in conversation with Marcia Chatelain, the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America  won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize.*recorded 5/3/2025